Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

There were certainly a number of interesting developments in 2011, including the release of BI 4.0 and the ever increasing hype about HANA. But more importantly my family ended the year healthy and happy and that’s far more important. I certainly wish the same for you, your family, and your friends. I’m taking a break now and will be back again to talk about mundane BI topics next year.

I will be kicking off January with the next post in my “becoming a blogger” series. I will be starting off my conference season for 2012 by attending MicroStrategy World later that month followed by attendance (and speaking) at the BI 2012 event at the end of February. I’m delivering several track sessions at BI 2012, including co-teaching a primer on universe design with Michael Welter.

But until then, best of wishes to everyone for a happy and healthy new year. 😎

One of the possible enhancements we have been requesting for years is the ability to validate prompts. (We’ve also been looking for the ever-so-popular ability to use a formula such as “Today()” as a default for a prompt but this is different.) If we had true cascading prompts in Web Intelligence that would eliminate one use case for validated prompts but not all. I had someone comment on my blog recently asking about how to validate one prompt selection against another and that started me thinking… what would something like this look like if we did get it? Continue reading “Why Can’t I Validate Prompts?”

Most of my friends know that I’m their friend in real life, not on Facebook. 🙂 I’ve never joined that service, initially through lack of interest and later on through genuine concerns over their privacy issues and how much data people are seemingly willing to give up for a web site with, frankly, fairly minimal appeal, at least to me. I have also wondered in the past why corporations are so quick to give up control over their own content (replacing www.product_name.com with www.facebook.com/product_name). MicroStrategy offers a social media plugin that can pull in Facebook data, and of course SAP offers various methods to acquire and process unstructured data via their text analytics options in their Data Services products.

But this morning I read an article from Time.com suggesting that we might be looking at the beginning of the end for Facebook. I am not going to summarize the article here, but I would like to run an informal poll.

If you are a member of Facebook, are you using it:

• More now than you did last year?
• Less now than you did last year?
• About the same as what you did last year?

Please use the comment form below to enter your response.

I was checking the weather this morning and noticed that weather.com now offers a social media component to their web site. It seems that if I am so inclined, I can see what other folks in my area are saying about the weather. Without doing much, well, any research I am guessing that they’re simply looking at the location information that can optionally be provided on tweets and then scanning for certain weather-related keywords.

Here’s a screen shot of the fail I noticed. Have a look at some of the tweets.

How many of them are about the weather versus something else?

First I see a person from Garland (not far away from me) who is tweeting what appears to be various national headlines, including one about the real estate situation in Florida. Apparently there are “clouds on the horizon.” Does that have anything to do with weather in my area? 😆 No, but it does have a key word “clouds” included.

I like the next example even more. We certainly have clouds here in Texas, but I can’t remember the last time we had a blizzard. Yet someone from Lewisville, Texas, just a few miles up the road from me, is tweeting his disappointment about being left out of (again I’m assuming) a beta program for the game company Blizzard Entertainment and their next incarnation of the Diablo game series. Yes, there is a weather-related keyword in that tweet, but would it not make sense to tie key words to geographical areas? The odds of having a blizzard in Texas (the weather kind, at least) are slim.

This is part of what makes text analytics so difficult. Business Objects purchased a company several years ago (Inxight) that delivers text analytics; this product is now a part of the Data Services product line. It would be interesting to see if they have a feature that would allow me to tie geo-location services to keywords so that I could discount tweets mentioning blizzards in Texas, or hurricanes in Alaska.

Ultimately it comes down to context. When I read those tweets, I can immediately see that they’re not really talking about the weather, even if they do have weather-related keywords. Apparently it’s still challenging for software to do the same thing. Then again, it’s hard enough to predict the weather correctly, so maybe I can forgive them a few errant tweets. 😉

Over on BOB we’re having some fun with a few holiday logos in place of our standard green guy. Our regular board logo looks like this:

For the next few weeks, board members will see the logo rotate between alternate versions such as these:

And of course this:

During the American Thanksgiving week we used this:

Now I do realize that some of these logos are not necessarily going to reflect the global nature of our community. For example, the snowflake probably doesn’t make much sense to our friends below the equator. 😉 So that’s where this post comes in to play.

If you have a minimal amount of graphical talent (or even a lot!) and would like to have your work immortalized as a part of our community, here is your chance! Come up with a seasonal logo – it does not have to be for the end of year holiday season, it can be anything you like. For example, how about a special logo for talk like a pirate day?

Come up with a logo, and as long as it meets certain standards of taste (I don’t think I need to list the obvious issues here) we’ll consider adding your seasonal logo to the rotation next year. Until Google opens their next competition to design a Google Doodle, this could be your shot at Internet fame. Go for it. 😎

How do you submit an idea? Check out this topic on BOB for more details.

Related Links

• What is a Google Doodle?