ODIS Capabilities

Businesses spend billions of dollars each year collecting and storing massive amounts of diverse data, with the intent of using it to better meet current customer needs, capture new customers and improve their business outlook. The rapid growth of unstructured data (text, audio and video) has triggered a business challenge to turn disparate information into actionable knowledge.

Identifying details on customer spending habits, demographics, product preferences and response to marketing efforts are only the beginning. Determining relationships among these and other seemingly disconnected elements can expose patterns of activities that can help steer companies toward a productive and profitable future.

Information Mining and Management solutions are designed to quickly process large volumes of structured and unstructured data from various sources, identify consistent patterns and/or systematic relationships among variables and help reveal new insights. IBM specialists in this area focus on helping businesses unlock the critical market, customer and competitive intelligence they need to stay ahead.

• For a pharmaceutical company, this may mean analyzing all available internal and external research to discover unknown relationships between proteins.

• For a government agency, this may mean analyzing the content in billions of Web pages to discern potential threats.

• For a customer services group, this may mean automatically forwarding and translating incoming requests to improve customer service.

IBM’s market-leading Information Mining and Management research, business expertise and tools can help companies comprehend and unlock the value of information. Specialists work in a variety of areas.

• Advanced text analytics allow companies to identify patterns and relationships by extracting meaning from vast quantities of unstructured text to reveal new insight about customers, competitors and markets.

• Document processing uses IBM tools and methods, including Intelligent Form Processor (IFP), for highly efficient data correction and validation, and allows reliable form type recognition, form template dropout and character recognition accompanied by logical text analysis.

• Information integration specialty uses advanced technologies to explore numerous types of existing data and enables integration from available data sources. The scientists at IBM Research have been developing tools and paradigms for information integration, using XML technology to integrate vast amounts of disparate data sources.

• Information mining advanced services offers ability to quickly read and extract key information from text in its context, which significantly increases the value of mining in a business environment. Text mining can now be applied to uncover trends, identify links and provide analysis of concepts, not just words.

• Intelligence community technology and systems employ IBM advanced machine translation, linguistic tools, multimedia information mining and powerful search capabilities to address the needs of governments and intelligence agencies.

• Retail and aftermarket specialty offers IBM on demand solutions, including software, services and expertise, designed to respond to the dynamic needs of automotive service and parts operations. For example, ODIS is helping manufacturers enhance and expand their relationships with thousands of dealers, fleets and independent repair shops.

• Unstructured Information Management Architecture is an open source platform for creating, integrating and deploying solutions for extracting knowledge buried in text from the Web and corporate documents such as technical reports, problem reports, customer communications, e-mail, voicemail and blogs.