Text Mining and Data Warehousing for Optimizing Preventative Maintenance

by Curt Hall

Last month (see "Corporate Use of Text Analysis and Mining Grows," 25 May 2010), I wrote that organizations are showing more interest in using text analysis and mining tools to support their BI efforts. I based my comments on the results of a Cutter Consortium survey [1] that found that approximately one-quarter of end-user organizations surveyed are now analyzing text/unstructured data in some capacity to support their BI efforts. In addition, 18% of these same survey respondents indicated that they now integrate unstructured data into their data warehouses to support their BI initiatives. A joint project between airplane parts manufacturer/distributor B/E Aerospace, data warehouse vendor Teradata Corporation, and text mining and analysis tools vendor Clarabridge, Inc., provides a good example of how organizations are combining text mining and data warehousing.