Good article by Bill Inmon that discusses how data warehousing will evolve to adapt to how the business uses the data and be able to tap into the largely unstructured data that makes up most of an organization’s information. This is what he’s terming to be DW 2.0.
If you are not sure what the difference is between structured, semi-structured and unstructured data is then you should head over to Dan Linstedt’s blog where he has a breakdown of each. That post also goes into more of the promise of what DW 2.0 has to the business.
Mining unstructured data, finding patterns, tagging data with perspectives and drawing correlations and probabilities is pretty exciting. For example, back when I was in the Pathology Informatics department at UPMC we collaborated with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Institute to pick out patterns in images of tissue sample. The goal was to have a slide captured, analyzed and labeled as to whether cancer exists in the tissue or not.
We’re getting to the point where we should begin to expect that the business intelligence we get from all our data becomes more proactive. Even learns from us. So that when those dashboards fire up on Monday morning our decision support systems should be more like decision suggest systems.
