Three key technology innovations have emerged and stabilized, such that their combination creates a disruptive opportunity to the way today’s enterprises manage, analyze and action their information. The disruption is simple in concept, information becomes unified.
Unified Information is important because it offers a single information source over an enterprise’s complete information set, be it external or internally held, in a database or an information management system. With a unified information approach, all information can be used for analysis, information governance, business processes, and to gain insight, at a fraction of the cost and time, without the restrictions of traditional methods.
Two of these innovations are:
On their own, these developments offer some value to the structured data world as relational data moves easily to Graph, and traditional data applications can be modified to access Linked Open Data. However, on their own, these innovations offer little to the unstructured information world (i.e. information stored within content management systems), as content needs additional processing to make its information machine addressable. Addressable such that it can automatically become an analytical resource, just as data is; and addressable so that business operations dependent on content can be processed automatically.
- Post-relational database technology, such as Graph databases. Because this type of database is not schema constrained, it offers the ability to ask unbounded questions. Critically Graph solves the weakness of traditional data approaches since there is no need to pre-suppose the questions that need answering – something relational models need in order to work.
- The Linked Open Data movement means that access to shared information resources and agreed data naming structures is a reality for many industries, especially those that are collaborative in nature as well as information intensive. Linked Open Data resources are growing exponentially as organizations contribute to industry initiatives to standardize and share data.
There is untapped business value locked away in content because content represents and contains the majority of an organization’s intelligence (Gartner indicates more than 80% of an organization’s information volume). This intelligence is not easily accessible as it requires human processing to make it so, which is costly, time-consuming and given the exponential increase in volumes, and the amount of data in each piece of content, basically impossible to achieve manually.
To solve this, Smartlogic introduces the 3rd innovation needed to unify Information— Content Intelligence. Smartlogic’s Semaphore is a sophisticated semantic software technology that turns content into a ‘self-describing’ resource. The software models interpret, classify, analyze and visualizes content so that the information and facts that are locked up in content can be released and used in Graph, using Linked Open Data wherever it’s available.
As well as offering the promise of unified information for analysis over the full information set, making content ‘self-describing’ adds important capabilities to underlying information management systems. Once content-based information can automatically describe what it is about, the information and knowledge it contains, down to the RDF fact level, then these systems can automate business processes involving content.
Content Intelligence is used by Smartlogic customers to augment content management, improve Business Intelligence and analytics and enhance enterprise search systems. The types of activity that these systems provide are:
The relevance to cloud-based information management systems is high as there is an ongoing change in the way enterprises are deploying content management, search and business intelligence systems. The rapid adoption of systems like Google for Work; MS Office 365; Adobe Experience Manager; OpenText Cloud; Documentum on Demand and IBM Watson Analytics, means that enterprises are committing their content and data to the cloud. To be able to offer unified information and content processing facilities for these cloud-based applications Smartlogic has recently introduced Semaphore Cloud. This is a full multi-tenancy platform as a service (PaaS), which makes cloud-based content ‘self-describing’.
- Audit what content you have
- More intelligently archive and migrate content
- Secure sensitive content
- Manage records based on the information it contains
- Drive workflow/case management based on the information it contains
- Easily find and discover information and expertise
- Augment business intelligence to answer questions you could not before
- Harmonize your data by unifying information
The future is one where information is unified; content is automatically processed regardless of location and information is treated as a whole. Smartlogic makes this happen, today.
