Factiva splashes out with WebFountain

Business information company Factiva is revamping a text analytics application which it claims will let customers extract trends, patterns and relationships from "billions of pages" of unstructured and semi-structured text.

The Dow Jones and Reuters venture will co-develop the application using IBM's WebFountain, which its describes as a "web-scale mining and discovery platform".

Factiva is the first company to license the IBM e-business on demand service and its text analytics technology.

For Factiva applications, WebFountain's data analysis will include Factiva's global collection of thousands of information sources.

Anthea Stratigos, chief executive of content analysis firm Outsell: "Factiva and IBM are leading a major shift in the use of content, moving away from simple search to sophisticated application suites that will transform business processes."

Factiva's first application to be developed using the WebFountain platform will offer customers an external view of a company's reputation by analysing information from a collection of Factiva sources, internet pages and newsgroups.

The resulting analysis, according to the information firm, will be presented in a report that shows the data in context, providing a view on relevant business issues and showing industry trends.

"It's the information that organisations don't know - outside their four walls and beyond the typical market research and outdated surveys - that can be the most critical for decision making," said Robert Carlson, IBM WebFountain vice president.

"But until now, there was no single tool that could derive real intelligence from billions of pages."