A Fountain of Knowledge 2004 will be the year of the analysis engine By Stephen Cass, IEEE Spectrum Online (Jan 4, 2004)
Cass describes the intentions and workings of IBM's Web Fountain. Search engines list documents with matching words. Web Fountain will analyze to make sense of it.
"WebFountain works by converting the myriad ways information is presented online into a uniform, structured format that can then be analyzed. The goal is to provide a general-purpose platform that can allow any number of so-called analytic tools to sift the structured data for patterns and trends. "
WebFountain will convert to structured data the content of web sites, blogs, newsgroups, mailing lists and more.
"WebFountain is not intended for casual surfers. Its target audience includes the business executives who have already shown they are willing to pay for the insights that mining corporate databases can supply. Analytic tools can ferret out patterns in, say, a sales receipt database, so that a retail store might see that people tend to buy certain products together and that offering a package deal would help sales. WebFountain will allow executives to go beyond their own databases and analyze up-to-date information from any online source. "
Factiva has partnered with IBM and will be launching a WebFountain-based service to track the online reputation of companies.