While the rapid growth of data presents real opportunity for consumers and businesses in terms of intelligence and analytics, Fujitsu went a step further yesterday, unveiling new technology to link the data, enabling better analysis of the huge amounts of information available online.
The global IT company, in collaboration with NUI Galway’s Digital Enterprise Research Institute (Deri), has developed a platform which will bring together countless data sources to provide a single reference point.
Search function
Part of the technology is a search function enabling users to quickly sort and access data in a consistent format without the need for application developers to trawl through sites and process underlying data.
Pierre-Yves Vandenbussche, Fujitsu lead researcher based at Deri, said the purpose of the platform was to extract data from different parts of the web and integrate it for the purposes of analysis.
“We have built a platform to enable the processing of open data available on the web. We combine open data on the web to give new insights and allow for better analysis.”
For example, the platform can be used to provide valuable new insights into the financial performance of public corporations, by drawing financial information from multiple sources including industry profiles, employee numbers, revenues, profits, stock or share price and press coverage for comparison. Performing this task without the technology would have required specialist programming techniques or many hours of manual data-gathering.
Multiple applications
Anthony McCauley, head of research at Fujitsu in Ireland, said it was hoped the technology would lend itself to multiple applications – from financial appraisal to health breakthroughs – by enabling previously separate data sets to be analysed together.
Data can tell us about the performance of a business, the fuel efficiency of cars, the way taxes are spent or the rate of inflation in different countries.
The key innovation of the new technology is the ability to easily find and compare all of this data, which can then be used to build new businesses, streamline online commerce and accelerate scientific progress.
