An Introduction to Linked Data

Seth Grimes's Tweet on the Sandro Hawke's video presentation caught my attention. The presentation, entitled An Introduction to Linked Data, was recorded in June 8, 2010 at the Cambridge Semantic Web Gathering, occurred at Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT) in Cambridge, MA. Sandro works at World Wide Web Consortium, an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.

From a Summary: "Although the first Semantic Web standards are more than ten years old, only recently have we begun to actually see machines sharing data on the Web. The key turning point was the acceptance of the core Linked Data principle, that object identifiers should also work with Web protocols to access useful information. This talk will cover the basic concepts and techniques of publishing and using Linked Data, assuming some familiarity with programming and the Web. No prior knowledge of Semantic Web technologies is required."



The Slides of the presentation (PDF) are also available. Credits to Marco Neumann, that released the video on Vimeo.

Sentiment Analysis: Mining the Web for Feelings

I read in The New York Times a nice article about Sentiment Analysis, written by Alex Wright, where he commented about some new sentiment analysis companies that are trying to tap into the growing business interest in what is being said online. "The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data", he said.

“Social media used to be this cute project for 25-year-old consultants. Now, top executives are recognizing it as an incredibly rich vein of market intelligence”, said Margaret Francis, vice president for product at Scout Labs. “Our algorithm is about 70 to 80 percent accurate,” said Ms. Francis, who added that its users can reclassify inaccurate results so the system learns from its mistakes."

Jodange, another company, uses a sophisticated algorithm that not only evaluates sentiments about particular topics, but also identifies the most influential opinion holders, based on research by computer science professor Claire Cardie.

Newssift uses an experimental program that tracks sentiments about business topics in the news, coupled with a specialized search engine that allows users to organize their queries by topic, organization, place, person and theme. It is used by The Financial Times.

Bo Pang developed software that looks at several different filters, including polarity (is the statement positive or negative?), intensity (what is the degree of emotion being expressed?) and subjectivity (how partial or impartial is the source?). He is researcher at Yahoo, and co-wrote Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis, one of the first academic books on sentiment analysis.

“Sentiments are very different from conventional facts,” said Seth Grimes, the founder of Alta Plana, who points to the many cultural factors and linguistic nuances that make it difficult to turn a string of written text into a simple pro or con sentiment. “I see sentiment analysis becoming a standard feature of search engines,” he said, and suggests that such algorithms could begin to influence both general-purpose Web searching and more specialized searches in areas like e-commerce, travel reservations and movie reviews.

With the quick growth of social networks, the use of Sentiment Analysis is becoming increasingly important to get the sentiment right from human emotions and opinions, translating into data to make better decisions.

Beye Perspective - Flaws in the classic data warehouse and analytics in non-interactive media

Beye Perspective is an excellent initiative provided by B-Eye-Network, to share information and knowledge, listening opinions from BI Industry's experts.

This month, in the April Show, the panel discusses the current most popular article on BeyeNETWORK.com The Flaws of the Classic Data Warehouse Architecture by Rick Van der Lans and how analytics in traditionally non interactive media (newsprint) may help revive their business.

The experts on this panel are: Seth Grimes, Claudia Imhoff, Krish Krishnan and John Myers.

You can listen directly in the website or download as podcast (Mp3 file). B-Eye-Network also keeps the previous radio programs.

Beye Perspective - Data Warehousing Myths, Will IBM buy Sun?

The B-Eye-Network, in its program called Beye Perspective, publishes monthly a radio program where business intelligence and data warehousing experts discuss news, mergers and acquisitions, technology announcements and other relevant industry topics.

This month, in the March Show, the panel discusses the current most popular article on BeyeNETWORK regarding myths about data warehousing, the potential acquisition of Sun by IBM and the panel members even provide helpful tips for the new federal CIO.

The experts on this panel are: Seth Grimes, Claudia Imhoff, Krish Krishnan and John Myers.

You can listen directly in the website or download as podcast (Mp3 file). B-Eye-Network keeps the previous radio programs.

This is an excellent initiative to publicize news, trends and technologies, and also a good opportunity to listen opinions from experts of BI Industry.

Open Source BI Still Fighting For Its Share

Seth Grimes published today in Information Week, an article about Open Source BI called Open Source BI Still Fighting For Its Share (in the PDF file of the article the title is "Fine, but Not Fine-Tuned Yet").

He heard many executives of open source BI companies, mainly Steve Snyder of JasperReports and Richard Daley, CEO of Pentaho.

He said although the open source BI market is growing, the market remains dominated by the likes of Business Objects, Cognos, Microsoft, and Oracle.

BI suites typically cover core query, analysis, and reporting functions, and also provide data integration and dashboard visualization capabilities. Commercial open source BI vendors, notably Pentaho and JasperSoft, offer these components in free community editions with open source licenses, and also packaged with non-open source extensions in paid, supported, indemnified editions. The extensions include spreadsheet services for Microsoft Excel, Ajax interactive dashboards, and metadata abstraction layers that insulate business end users from the underlying database schema.

He also said that have two additional open source BI offerings are worth considering. The first, the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools project, is primarily of interest to Java developers. The second, the Palo OLAP Server from German firm Jedox, develops enterprise technologies for Excel applications, targeting enterprise planning, analysis, reporting, and consolidation apps.

One customer - Beyond Compliance, a provider of hosted compliance management software--uses Palo Excel-based reporting for analytical reports that include tables and graphs. Beyond Compliance harnesses the Palo OLAP Server on the back end and the non-open source Palo Worksheet Server for report distribution. "The nice thing about Palo is that we've taken report design away from developers and brought it to our client-services team, to end users," says Rick Clazie, Beyond Compliance's technology and infrastructure manager. The company doesn't measure the ROI of its open source choice in financial terms, trusting that faster reporting turnaround and extended capabilities increase client satisfaction.

He finished the article: Will others take this leap to open source BI? Gartner projects triple the adoption by 2012, implying much faster growth than the overall BI market. BI is making progress, particularly when commercially packaged to deliver usability and support lacking with free components. As people like Snyder and Clazie push these tools out to employees, that packaging, coupled with open source's lower costs, will be critical to open source BI's enterprise success.

Seth Grimes wrote a post with additional material in his blog in Intelligent Interprise, complementing his article, I would like to highlight:

OSBI's growing appeal to enterprise end users. End users need capable, robust, and usable software.

That core software components are free makes open source attractive both to end users and for systems integrators and independent software vendors that sell products and services built on OSBI components.

With open source, baseline costs are lowered, boosting margins, and [integrators and ISVs] have the ability to customize the code or develop extensions if they wish. Customers benefit and so does the greater user community. For instance, Yves de Montcheuil, marketing VP at open-source data-integration vendor Talend, boasts that half of his company’s 250 data-source/destination connectors were contributed by users.

In my opinion, Seth Grimes did a good explanation about how is the Open Source BI scenario.

Gartner Event Processing Summit 2008

The Gartner Event Processing Summit 2008 happened this month (15 - 16 September 2008 - Stamford, CT) and here are some links with posts and articles commenting on the conference:

- Intelligent Enterprise
. Event Processing Meets Text: Reuters at Gartner - Seth Grimes
. Event Processing Summit Image Gallery: Getting to Real-Time

- Tibco's Blog - Paul Vincent
. Gartner Event Processing Summit 2008: highlights
. Gartner Event Processing Summit 2008: overview

- Colin Clark on Event Processing
. Gartner Event Processing Summit - Day 1
. Gartner Event Processing Summit - Day 2

- Complex Events Processing
Wall Street Systems Announces Partnership With Aleri to Enhance its FX Trading Solution with CEP Technology

- Opher Etzion's Blog
On Gartner EPS 2008

- Event Processing Blog - Louis Lovas
Thank You Gartner - Event Processing Conference #1 In the Books

Voice of the Customer: Text Analytics for the Responsive Enterprise

Seth Grimes wrote a very nice report entitled Voice of the Customer: Text Analytics for the Responsive Enterprise, published recently in B-Eye Research.

He defines the report subject: "Text analytics helps business users discern and capture the Voice of the Customer from online media such as blogs, forum postings and news articles; from email, chat interactions and contact-center dialogues; and from surveys and other mechanisms for collecting customer feedback: from the totality of enterprise information sources.
This report describes how text analytics has become an essential part of Voice of the Customer solutions. It describes VoC techniques and processes and explains the fundamentals of text analytics technology and solutions. It covers implementation options and best practices, addressing the basic question: How do organizations get started with VoC text analytics? And it presents the findings of a best practices survey that asked end users and consultants about their goals, information source, return on investment (ROI), and advice for organizations looking into VoC text analytics."

The report is well divided; it has an introduction, three parts and an appendix. In the introduction, he did a question: What are your organization’s customers – and your prospects and the media – saying about your company and your products and your competition? And gave the answer: "Voice of the Customer (VoC) initiatives can answer that question and help you formulate your response. VoC is not just an extension of customer relationship management (CRM) to the customer experience. It is an approach that can guide enterprises in meeting the spectrum of sales, marketing, customer support, brand and reputation management, product and service design, and quality demands."

In the first part, called The Voice of the Customer, he defines the concepts, needs and challenges, sources and voices, and also the VoC elements and VoC process; finish talking about some users experience.

He talks about the fundamental business problems in the voice of the customer, and generally the organizations ask:
- How can we improve customer satisfaction?
- How can we maintain and increase our competitive edge?
- How can we boost profitability?

He also talks that the need is to hear, understand and act on customer, and the biggest VoC challenges are to identify and access all relevant sources and make sense of their contents. He classifies voice sources in operational systems, solicited feedback and "open source" intelligence. The open source intelligence is the information available to anyone: forum postings, news and review articles, blogs and other social media.

In the VoC elements, he talks about the concept of the net promoter score and customer lifetime value. In the VoC processes, he defines the setting goals, how information gathering and filtering, and explains the facts and opinions concepts: what distinguishes opinions from facts it that opinions convey sentiment, they convey attitudinal information. He also explains what is data enrichment and analysis. He finishes the first part describing user experiences.

In the second part, entitled Technical Insights, he defines the technical context and explains the text technology basics. The text analytics is an answer to the unstructured data challenge. With the availability of text analysis tools, large-scale, automated analysis of textual sources is finally attainable, and this shift has occurred for BI, for predictive analytics and for VoC efforts. He explains that sentiment analysis is one of the most exciting applications of text analytics nowadays, because sentiment is central to human communications, it is also of key importance for VoC study.

In the last part, called Study: VoC text Analytics Best practices, he talks about best practices for the implementation of VoC text analytics initiatives.

There is an appendix with links to some case studies and vendor solutions, provided by IBM, SPSS and Business Objects.

This is a very nice report, written by Seth Grimes, an expert in text analytics and should help everyone that is interested in use the concepts of text analytics in the companies.

Listening the B-Eye Perspective

The B-Eye-Network, in its program called Beye Perspective, publishes monthly a radio program where business intelligence and data warehousing experts discuss news, mergers and acquisitions, technology announcements and other relevant industry topics.


This month, the experts dig into the latest at Microsoft:
- the acquisition of DATAllegro and Zoomix
- the departure of Bill Baker – a well-respected and long-time member of the Microsoft team
- predictions for Microsoft in the data warehouse appliance and data quality markets


The panel also discusses software as a service as a way to get the midmarket involved in BI. The experts on this panel are: Claudia Imhoff, John Myers, Seth Grimes, Richard Hackathorn and Colin White.

You can listen directly in the website or download as podcast (Mp3 file). B-Eye-Network keeps in the same page the previous radio programs.

This is an excellent initiative to publicize news, trends and technologies, and also a good opportunity to listen opinions from experts of BI Industry.