Earlier this week, OpenText introduced its Election Tracker ’16. The Web-based tool allows election junkies to “visually monitor, compare and analyze” media coverage about the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. But it also spotlights the power of big data and content analytics tools offered by the Waterloo-based company.
“Analyzing both structured and unstructured data provides a full picture of any situation to enable smarter, data-driven business decisions,” said Adam Howatson, chief marketing officer at OpenText. “Election Tracker ’16 evaluates election news coverage, using the articles themselves as a source of unstructured data.”
He said the OpenText solution actually analyzes the content of the unstructured data,” much in the way a human would, only much faster and with a perfect memory and better aggregate insight over massive volumes.”
Election Tracker ’16 curates text from thousands of online news articles and global media outlets, to create meaningful, visual, and highly interactive dashboards that summarize and compare coverage across news outlets, presidential candidates, hot topics, and tone, according to the company.
The technology allows users to “visualize election trends as they unfold in the news media,” and enables users to compare candidates based on mentions across topics, history, geography, or sentiment. The topics, which represent key election issues, are dynamically generated from the news coverage, according to the company.
Electiontracker.us was built using Process Suite, Content Suite and Analytics Suite Release 16.
According to OpenText, most pure-play text analytics solutions are limited to translating free text to entities and taxonomies, leaving the actual visualization and analysis to other technologies. Electiontracker.us combines the power of content analytics with data analytics by using OpenText InfoFusion to process the content and OpenText Analytics Information Hub to provide dynamic, secure, and scalable visualization of the data.
While many databases and data visualization tools are available, most only deal with the structured data in an organization.
However, as the amount of unstructured data contains far greater insight and context, organizations are facing a fundamental challenge.
With OpenText, organizations can access and harvest data from any unstructured source, including documents, Websites, social sites (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), email, document archives (PDF), RSS feeds and blogs – even EIM, ECM, CRM and other core Enterprise systems.
These sources can then be combined with structured data to provide a complete picture of the organization and valuable context including customer sentiment, discussion, brand coverage, media and Internet trends or anything you can imagine, according to OpenText.
