From unstructured data to actionable intelligence

There's content everywhere, but not the information you need. Content analysis can organize a pile of text into a richly accessible repository. This article explains two key technologies for generating metadata about content - automatic categorization and information extraction. These technologies, and the applications that metadata makes possible, can transform an organization's reservoir of unstructured content into a well-organized repository of knowledge. With metadata available, a company's search system can move beyond simple dialogs to richer means of access that work in more situations. Information visualization, for example, uses metadata and our innate visual abilities to improve access. Besides better access, metadata enables intelligent switching in the content flows of various organizational processes - for example, making it possible to automatically route the right information to the right person. A third class of metadata applications involves mining text to extract features for analysis using the statistical approaches typically applied to structured data. For example, if you turn the text fields in a survey into data, you can then analyze the text along with other data fields. All these metadata-powered applications can improve your company's use of its information resources.