|
Page 1 of 2
By Michael Eggebrecht
How do you bring together structured and unstructured data within an organization? As information proliferates in our digital age, it's a question many have pondered. But more recently, the question has evolved: How do you combine structured and unstructured information, treat them in the same way, and put a unified interface on top?
Technology providers from the search side, like Endeca, Exalead and two-year-old Attivio, say that they have the answer. But business intelligence players such as SAP BusinessObjects are also making a mark in the area.
Unified information access is about putting together a single view for a business user by taking "information from databases and structured data and business intelligence systems and combining that with text-based unstructured information or images," says Hadley Reynolds, research director for search and digital marketplace technologies at IDC.
The idea is to break down the walls between a company's transactional data and the narrative information carried in text. A customer sales representative, for example, would be able to see both a customer's order history and news and notes related to the company.
In their quest for more intelligent business performance management, risk monitoring and decision-making, companies are pressing for technology that can do exactly that, said IDC in a report issued in December. "Adding unstructured information to the more mature data management and analysis tools will require a combined software architecture and metadata approach that is only beginning to emerge," according to the research firm.
Leaders in the movement toward unified information access are likely to come out of the search space, says Reynolds, "even though the business intelligence community has given a lot of lip service to this."
|
