An earlier surprise was the overflow turn-out for my pre-summit workshop, Text Analytics for Dummies. I made 25 copies of my materials, thinking I'd need 20 but falling 10-12 short, another bit of evidence of rapid growth in broad-market ("Dummies") interest. I'll share those materials with IE readers. Nick Patience got similar, great turn-out for his market-survey session that followed my session.
Next, the number of attendees from start-ups was particularly interesting, both companies developing or launching new products and companies looking to license technology, most often Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools, especially for sentiment analysis, from established vendors. Summit attendance was 175-200 — I'm summit chair, but the summit is commercially run and I'm not privy to the numbers — of whom I'd estimate 40% were current end-users or prospects, 25% were from established vendors, 25% were from start-ups and others entering the field and consultants, and the rest were analysts, journalists, and miscellaneous others. 数据挖掘工具
I'll conclude with one disappointing surprise on the technical front, that UIMA — the Unstructured Information Management Architecture, an integration framework created by IBM and released several years ago as open source to the Apache project — has not been more broadly accepted. IBM software architect Thomas Hampp spoke about his company's use of the framework in the OmniFind Analytics edition, but Technology Panel participants said that their companies — Attensity (David Bean), Business Objects (Claire Thomas), Clarabridge (Justin Langseth), Jodange (Larry Levy), and SPSS (Olivier Jouve) — simply do not perceive user demand for the interoperability that UIMA can offer.
I enjoyed every aspect of the 2008 Text Analytics Summit and will plan to post more about what I learned.
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