In a house with six kids, spring cleaning is a big deal. By the end of March, there can be dozens of pairs of shoes and boots clogging the mud room, not to mention a sea of ski parkas, winter coats, hats, scarves, and countless orphaned mittens and gloves. Each bedroom is equally littered with the spoils of winter, and everyone is eager for the “out with the old, in with the new” purge that spring cleaning promises.
One year, after a particularly harsh winter season, the powers that be in the household (the parents) went a bit nuts trying to clean it all and decided, instead, to organize a Great Purge. Everyone in the house was instructed to pull everything into a group of piles in their room: clothes that needed to go to storage, clothes they’d outgrown, clothes and boots for Goodwill, items that could be hand-me-downs, things that needed to be washed…
You get the picture. Once all the piles were arranged, boxes and laundry baskets were brought around to each room before anyone could forget which pile was which. Each kid placed their items into the correct box or laundry basket, and the boxes were carried off by the bigger kids.
As all the boxes were put neatly away in the basement, everyone was able to sweep away the winter dust and to make room for their spring wardrobe.
Using data tags to clean house
Does your data look like our house full of six messy kids? Admit it, you’ve got data strewn across every office silo, and a data mudroom so chock full of stray bits of text, you can no longer see the floor. It’s time to organize – with data tags.
Imagine being able to take all that stray data, throw it into a big pile, put it through a filter and have it come out on the other side, neatly arranged into compartments that make sense to you and to your business.
eContext is a text analytics solution that can take text data from any source — clickstream, social, customer profiles, you name it — and normalize it in real time into a topic hierarchy that you can use. Tag your data so that you can put it in the right bin to be analyzed, recycled, or thrown away, and suddenly you’ve got a very organized space to work with.
There’s another reason eContext is so good for your data purge. With some category structures, your data gets organized into very shallow categories, so you might wind up with the entire family’s boots in one box, and all the ski parkas in another. eContext extends to 21 tiers, so you can organize your data into very specific nodes. Instead of a box full of boots, you wind up with a series of specific boxes in your data basement, very neatly labeled, “boys ski boots”, “girls rain boots”, “riding boots”, “snow boots”, and “winter hiking boots”.
Ready for a new season?
It was always our parents’ dream that once the house was in order, we’d take the opportunity to “keep everything in its place from now on.” Of course, this never really happens when six kids are running around, but as a grown-up with tons of data charging through the door every day, you have the opportunity to keep your data in check constantly.
Because it can filter and tag your data in real time, you can use eContext continually to keep your data spring-cleaning-fresh. As much data as you have, from any source, in real time. Organized into 21 categories, and more than 450,000 nodes.
Now get out that broom. It’s time for a good data sweep.
