Let’s dig in to uncover a brief history of Data. Our world started digitizing data in the 20th century. The process started with the transactional data used in Accounting where information is neatly organized in rows and columns. Today, decades later, we are digitizing every insight and sharing it across the enterprise, personal connections and partners. So, the question is, ‘In what format is this unstructured data present?’ Well, the enormous amount of enterprise information is present in the form of texts, documents, emails, presentations, graphics, audio, video, webpages… and the list goes on. In short, it simply doesn’t fall under the conditions defined by the relational data model. Now, unstructured data cannot be ignored because it is often the storehouse of important insights that can be used to make important business decisions. So, do we have tools to explore unstructured data?
We do have some powerful breeds of search and data management tools to help us make sense of unstructured data. Text search tools like SOLR, Elastic Search, Amazon CloudSearch and 3RDi Search are few examples that help to organize amorphous text data so common in today’s business. These tools are equipped with an array of powerful text mining features that are designed for faster and more accurate analysis of unstructured data. Let’s take a quick tour of the tools on a high level. Let’s take a quick tour of the tools on a high level.
Solr and Elastic Search, both are based on Lucene that provides advanced search capabilities and the ability to grow as needed. These are open source licenses. Solr indexing with advanced pre-processing support includes tokenization as well as query support feature, along with spell-checking and highlighting. It efficiently searches for the subsets of the documents, and at the same time, implements full search and faceted search. Elastic Search stores documents in JSON format and the text fields are indexed. This doesn’t require scheme specification prior to loading the documents, as it detects the document structure from JSON documents directly. Support Services and add-ons development are available for both SOLR and Elastic search.
Amazon cloud based search is a managed service from AWS. The search services can be setting up AWS management console. Searchable documents can be managed in guidance to the common configuration.
The 3RDi Search – the technological innovation from The Digital Group – signifies the launch of a whole new growth of rich possibilities in the data centric world. It’s an open source infrastructure and truly a one-stop solution for all search and associated needs. It’s compatible with all major semantic enrichment frameworks and provides the full spectrum of domain expertise across most domains, verticals and locales.
