Blending Unstructured and Structured Data with Semantics: A Case Study

Marketing organizations are a challenge for IT to support. Their data needs change at least every quarter to quarter, and from campaign to campaign. They are often pulling data together by hand from Salesforce.com, their own spreadsheets, and industry data from the web. Increasingly, they’re blending in social data from Twitter, Facebook, and other more unstructured, unpredictable sources.

Traditional, relational data management technologies offer neither the flexibility nor the usability required to support marketing organizations. There's no single data warehouse model that can serve their needs reliably. So marketers either live in Excel, or are frustrated.

Semantic Technology offers a new, flexible data model that can blend structured and unstructured information, and is uniquely suited to incorporated ad hoc information from the web, social media, industry reports, and other sources.

This presentation will present a case study using a semantic technology platform to integrate structured and unstructured information into a comprehensive competitive intelligence solution for marketing, including the following:

Mashing Salesforce.com data together with random Excel data
Building reports on real-time market intelligence
Combining ad hoc, personal data combined with managed data in a single view

Lee Feigenbaum (@LeeFeigenbaum) is a co-founder of Cambridge Semantics, where he serves as VP of Marketing and Technology. Lee brings over a decade of experience with Semantic Web technologies to this role, helping to direct the development of the Anzo product suite to solve customers' ever-changing and diverse data challenges. Prior to co-founding Cambridge Semantics, Lee spent over five years as an engineer with IBM's Advanced Internet Technology Group. There, Lee helped architect and develop successive iterations of a semantic application architecture, culminating in the open-source release of the IBM Semantic Layered Research Platform. Lee is an active member of the W3C Semantic Web standards community, and currently serves as the Co-Chair of the W3C's SPARQL Working Group. Lee authored a 2007 Scientific American article on the Semantic Web, and writes regularly about Semantic Web technologies at his blog, TechnicaLee Speaking. Lee holds a B.A. in Computer Science from Harvard University.