This time of year, we pundit types like to post our summations of the past year's developments, our Best Of lists recapping our own work, and our industry predictions for next year, for 2010. Not me, not this year. I will, however, post on the year ahead... for me, on BI and analytics topics that I plan to cover in the next few months...

Seth Grimes, Contributor

December 30, 2009

3 Min Read

This time of year, we pundit types like to post our summations of the past year's developments, our Best Of lists recapping our own work, and our industry predictions for next year, for 2010. Not me, not this year. I will, however, post on the year ahead... for me, on BI and analytics topics that I plan (or at least hope) to cover in the next few months.I wrote the first of the topics I'll list on my office whiteboard probably three years ago, back when I was learning about streaming data (now, more commonly, complex event processing), and maybe its time has finally come:

  1. Data Uncertainty and Provenance

This item would look at work by researchers including Stanford University's Jennifer Widom. Next are a recurrent data miner's question,

  1. Is More Data Better?

and a topic suggested by my friend Mitch Wyle, who works in Engineering Excellence at Microsoft,

  1. Information Destruction

This item would explore what to do when data becomes what a developer would call cruft, but how do you tell when it's at that stage? Next, I think I have a juicy topic in

  1. Misreading the Numbers

This item would look at examples of data misinterpretation and mispresentation by BI analysts and writers including myself.

One more data/analysis article would cover mashable application elements for analysis and visualization of BI and text-derived information:

  1. Gaggles of Gadgets (or maybe The World of Widgets)

The balance of my planned topics are in text analytics and related areas. One will look at the underappreciated role text analytics -- right now primarily in the form of entity annotation -- is playing and will play in

  1. Building the Semantic Web

A second will be written from my perspective as a BI and analytics maven:

  1. Challenges for Semantic Web Proponents

Three more:

  1. Question Answering Systems (such as IBM's Watson)

  2. The Care and Feeding of Knowledge Bases (examples include Wolfram Alpha)

  3. Language Generation

The latter is very advanced application of computational linguistics that would turn analytics work inside-out.

My last topic is one I plan to spin out of a class I'm slated to present at next June's annual meeting of the Special Libraries Association, "From Pattern Matching to Knowledge Discovery Using Text Mining and Visualization Techniques":

  1. Visualizing Text

These are my big topics, and I'll continue to write on others that come up. I'll post on areas related to conferences -- I'm slated to keynote a Washington DC Social Media Strategies program in January, I'm organizing a Sentiment Analysis Symposium in New York in early April, and I'm reprising my role as chair of the Text Analytics Summit, scheduled for May 25-26, 2010 -- and on BI and analytics domains I track including analytical database systems, government BI, information visualization, and location intelligence. 2010 will be an interesting year!This time of year, we pundit types like to post our summations of the past year's developments, our Best Of lists recapping our own work, and our industry predictions for next year, for 2010. Not me, not this year. I will, however, post on the year ahead... for me, on BI and analytics topics that I plan to cover in the next few months...

About the Author(s)

Seth Grimes

Contributor

Seth Grimes is an analytics strategy consultant with Alta Plana and organizes the Sentiment Analysis Symposium. Follow him on Twitter at @sethgrimes

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