IBM Emerging Technologies - jStart - Solutions

BigSheets: extending business intelligence through web data

jStart Subject Matter Experts: Jim Smith and Dan Gisolfi

BigSheets is an extension of the mashup paradigm that:

A component of IBM InfoSphere BigInsights solution
Integrates gigabytes, terabytes, or petabytes of unstructured data from web-based repositories
Collects a wide range of unstructured web data stemming from user-defined seed URLs
Extracts and Enriches that data using the unstructured information management architecture you choose (LanguageWare,OpenCalais, etc.)
Lets you Explore and Visualize this data in specific, user defined contexts. (such as ManyEyes)

What problems are addressed?

Massive amounts of unstructured web data just isn't being leveraged properly. Typical BigSheets scenarios for this include:

Research and analytics of structured databases result in dated information that cannot properly guide strategies or support decisions.
The reach of your business intelligence data is limited to enterprise databases - providing only a one-sided view of the real business environment.
Customer preferences and website activity are captured only through pre-packaged, outsourced web analytics. There is no way to do it yourself.

What opportunities are presented?

Better understand your customers, research competitors, diversify supply chains, or be the first to discover relevant industry trends. Extend and take control of your web analytics with this customizable rich web tool.
Go beyond structured database management into unstructured data management with BigSheets. Seeing the whole picture will help all levels of your business make better decisions.
Provides business users with a new approach to keep pace with data escalation. By taking the structure to the data, you can mine petabytes of data without additional storage requirements.

The BigSheets Business Value

Broader data management--not just database management--is required to keep pace with escalation of enterprise and web data. The total amount of data warehoused by enterprises is doubling every three years (source: Forrester Research). The total number of web users is growing exponentially, with 1.6 Billion users this year up 23.8% from 2008 (source: internet world stats). As the data and use frequency continues to increase, the ability to capture and collect insights from all of this data -and all of the people behind the data- is becoming more limited each day.

"...just trust me: Big Sheets is the real deal, and the shape of things to come."

Stephen O'Grady, Industry Analyst, Redmonk

"...a level of integration that I haven't seen."

Ben Lorica, a senior analyst, O'Reilly Media

"BigSheets brings new insights by comparing data from many different pages as well as over time."

Eytan Adar, an assistant professor of information and
computer science at the University of Michigan

If you already know exactly what you are looking for, combining internal databases and external web queries is an adequate way of finding and assembling content. But this approach requires extensive time, effort, and a bit of luck when attempting to mine for business patterns and opportunities - especially if you aren't quite sure what you're looking for. A tool like BigSheets provides business users with a new approach that allows them to break down data into consumable, situation-specific frames of reference. This enables organizations to translate untapped, unstructured, and often unknown web data into actionable intelligence.

A pre-case scenario that better illustrates BigSheets's capabilities can be found here. If you would like to know more about Massive Mashups and how your organization can start to leverage them for real returns, contact the jStart team.