Briefs

Companies are increasingly using text mining tools to harness the information in their unstructured data.

Drew Robb -- JUNE 21, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Unstructured data, most of it in the form of text files, typically accounts for 85% of an organization's knowledge stores, but it's not always easy to find, access, analyze or use. "We are drowning in information but are starving for knowledge," says Mani Shabrang, technical leader in research and development at Dow Chemical Co.'s business intelligence (BI) center in Midland, Mich. "Information is only useful when it can be located and synthesized into knowledge."

But a new generation of text mining tools allows companies to extract key elements from large unstructured data sets, discover relationships and summarize the information. Many organizations are deploying or considering such software to deal with their mountains of text, despite the need for specialized skills to make implementations work.

For example, since 2000 Dow's research staff has been using ClearResearch software from ClearForest Corp. in New York to extract data from a century's worth of chemical patent abstracts, published research papers and the company's own files.

Here is the rest of the story.