Business Insights Workbench (BIW)
Business Insights Workbench (BIW) is a solution offered by IBM Research - Almaden that provides integrated structured and unstructured information mining. BIW embeds a suite of information analytics and data processing technologies to improve the caliber of decision making for enterprises.
Unlike traditional information analytics approaches that focus on mining unstructured or structured information alone, BIW brings together the worlds of structured and unstructured data in a single analytics platform and utilizes both types of information to discover significant business insights that could not otherwise have been obtained. For example, trends in the numeric data can reveal a slowdown in sales in a particular region during a certain time period. Analysis of the related documents, such as customer complaints and product reviews, can help determine the cause of the slowdown. The approach used for this is to extend an OLAP model enhanced with text analysis.
The key differentiators of BIW technologies from existing known technologies include the following:
- Combining dimensional data warehousing technologies and text indexing and search techniques to enable flexible, scalable, and adaptive analytical rendering of the information.
- Combining text mining and structured data mining techniques to expand the scope and depth of the discovered business insights.
- Coupling a wide range of visualization and graphics techniques (as shown below) with information analytics to allow users to examine data and analytics results in different views and thereby revealing hidden patterns.
