IEI is proud to announce its latest technology partnership with local software firm Datafiniti. This four-year old company has the ambitious agenda of being the search engine for data on companies, people, and products. They spun off from the Houston-based 80 Legs project, which bills itself as the world’s most powerful web crawler.
Via Datafiniti, IEI is now offering a “better, cheaper, faster” NAICS industry code append service. Just give us a list of domain names for companies in your database and we’ll append the closest relevant NAICS code. The service works via a semantic analysis of the site’s content and it’s a convenient and cost-effective alternative to other approaches to industry code appending.
Furthermore, Datafiniti’s strength in web crawling gives it the ability to perform some of the toughest tasks in data harvesting: accurate searching for highly specific product specifications, ratings, and reviews. If you’ve ever searched for a product that isn’t used by tens of millions of users, then you know how difficult this proposition is. For competitive intelligence professionals these types of tasks are important everyday queries and having timely, accurate pricing and review data is essential. IEI is very pleased to now be able to offer this capacity to our customers who want to append product data to company records, append reviews to product records, or to monitor product pricing and review information for competitive intelligence purposes.
posted by Shyamali Ghosh on January 6, 2014
by Shyamali Ghosh
Most open data — data that’s free to use, reuse, and redistribute — is public information that governments publish as a key part of “transparency” initiatives. It can be a boon to information services already skilled in curating and adding value to public information, though these companies often struggle with expensive, slow, and cumbersome processes to get at the “gold” buried in government filings and research data. Every step governments take to make this public data easier to use has a direct effect on the bottom lines of these firms.
The crux of the matter is that just because the information is available doesn’t mean that it’s easy to use. U.S. government agencies are now, however, more and more often requiring consistent data inputs and creating APIs that allow this standardized data to be searched, sorted, and exported in many ways. This added investment by governments along with the rise of private firms that help agencies visualize their data, such as Socrata and NIC, are leading to a renaissance in open data visualization.
FlowingData has a great round-up of 2013’a data visualizations, good and bad. Many are complex and beautiful—the Circos archetype’s visualization of genomic data springs to mind—but a good visualization need not be so intricate. Clean, uncomplicated graphics can be useful to citizens and power users of public data alike.
A good, simple example of the challenge of open data is the following chart that IEI published earlier this year. It’s based on industry data released in SEC EDGAR filings, and shows revenues per employee by industry. These datapoints are buried in the SEC filings and even the extremely important recent migration of filings to an XBRL format doesn’t make this kind of data easily accessible; it takes a lot of manual manipulation to get at this data set. After that manual effort, however, a simple visual representation of this key operational metric makes the difference between compensation in the restaurant and the energy industries, $53,920 and $4,963,000 respectively, really pop.
posted by Shyamali Ghosh on December 30, 2013
