• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

ClearForest Announces Support for IBM Open Source Text Analytics

Posted on: Monday, 8 August 2005, 09:00 CDT

ClearForest, a provider of text-driven business intelligence solutions, today announced three business intelligence applications leveraging IBM's open Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) standard. ClearForest's text analytics solutions for Quality Early Warning, Fraud Detection and Customer Loyalty also leverage IBM WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition for enterprise search.

ClearForest's text analytics solutions for Quality Early Warning, Fraud Detection and Customer Loyalty enable companies to extract and analyze vital information from unstructured content (such as Word files, Web pages, RSS feeds, warranty claims or call center notes) for use in value-added business intelligence applications. ClearForest's solutions can serve as stand-alone analytics applications enabling specific queries, visual analytics and reports, or can be fully integrated within an existing BI system via the UIMA architecture, uniting the previously disconnected disciplines of unstructured data analytics and structured business intelligence.

"To date, business intelligence has matured almost entirely around numerical data," said Bob Pulcini, Partner, IBM Business Consulting Services. "With the advent of UIMA, there is now an opportunity to add data from unstructured sources to traditional, structured BI systems. Our positive experience with ClearForest's Quality Early Warning application makes their support of UIMA particularly exciting. Packaged, UIMA-compliant applications such as ClearForest's will be the key for enabling customers to upgrade traditional BI analytics."

Today's announcement builds upon the existing relationship between IBM and ClearForest. ClearForest's support of IBM's full range of integration products - from IBM WebSphere DataStage, to IBM Tivoli Identity Manager, to IBM DB2 Alphablox - offers customers enhanced ability to bridge the worlds of structured and unstructured data.

ClearForest Product Suite:

ClearForest provides a complete suite of information extraction and analysis tools that enable companies to turn free-text into a valuable source of business intelligence. ClearForest's packaged UIMA annotators include:

-- Quality Early Warning

The ClearForest Quality Early Warning annotator was specifically developed to address market requirements for improving product quality. Designed to drive down warranty costs by detecting root cause product failures quickly, this application helps users decrease preventable product safety recall and/or litigation threats.

-- Fraud Detection

ClearForest's Fraud Detection annotator is designed to provide insight into social networking and organizational networks for profiling and fraud prevention, this extraction module also improves cross-departmental collaboration and organizational responsiveness.

-- Customer Loyalty

The Customer Loyalty annotator addresses a corporation's requirements for monitoring and responding to the voice of its most important asset: its customers. ClearForest enables companies to analyze information from call centers, customer emails and surveys to determine how customers are responding to corporate initiatives ranging from sales and marketing promotions to product enhancements.

"Today's industry leaders face increasing levels of compliance issues, competitive threats, and customer retention concerns on a daily basis," said Barak Pridor, CEO of ClearForest. "CIOs from the financial industry to the manufacturing sector have been looking for new and innovative ways of incorporating traditional database systems, query tools, and BI applications with new solutions for accessing unstructured content. UIMA meets that challenge and lays down a blueprint for the BI infrastructure of the future."

About UIMA

UIMA is a standard architecture developed by IBM Research that can be used to add text analytics to any application. It enables interoperability among different analytics software and enterprise applications, and provides tools for developers to speed the creation of new, reusable text analytics components. UIMA can also be used to support wider reaching enterprise search applications by providing a common mechanism for delivering natural language processing, helping computers understand text and extract deeper levels of meaning, including the relationships that define specific facts. UIMA compliant text analytic components can use WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition to clarify the meaning of terms, mine text to find hidden knowledge, and extract useful business information.

About ClearForest

ClearForest Corp. is a provider of text-driven business intelligence solutions, supplying the analytical bridge between two previously disconnected worlds of information--unstructured text and enterprise data. In allowing both to be analyzed simultaneously, ClearForest makes unified business intelligence a reality. Our award-winning solutions enable customers such as Eastman Chemical, Reuters, Elsevier Science and International Finance Corporation to turn large volumes of contextually-based information into proactive business intelligence.

Corporate headquarters are in Waltham, Mass. For more information, please visit www.clearforest.com. (C)2005 ClearForest Corp.

Source: Business Wire

More News in this Category