Italian Firm Adds to the Buzzword Blizzard in an Expert Way

March 7, 2016

I don’t pay too much attention to lists of functions an information intelligence system must have. The needs are many because federation, normalization of disparate data, and real time content processing are not ready for prime time. Don’t believe me? Ask the US Army which is struggling with the challenges of DCGS-A, Palantir, and other vendors’ next generation systems in actual use in a battle zone. (See this presentation for one example.)

I read “No Time to Waste! 5 Essential Features for Your Information Intelligence Solution.” I like the idea of a company (Expert System) which was founded a quarter century ago, urging speedy action.

You can work through the well worn checklist of entity extraction, links and relationships, classification, and sticking info in a “knowledge base.” I want to focus on one point which introduces a nifty bit of jargon which I had not seen in use since I was in college decades ago.

The word is anaphora.

There you go. An anaphora, as I recall, is repetition or word substitution. Not clear? Here are a couple of examples:

Rhetorical:

For want of revenue the investors were lost.

For want of a product credibility was lost.

For want of an application the market was lost.

Grammatical:

The marketing cacophony increased and that drove off the potential customers.

Now you can work these points into your presentation when the users want actionable information which fuses available information into a meaningful output.

Because modern systems are essentially works in progress, buzzwords like anaphora take the place of dealing with real world information problems.

But marketing by thought leaders is so much more fun. That may trouble some. Parse that, gentle reader. What can one make in the midst of a blizzard of buzzwords? One hopes revenue which keeps the stock out of penny territory.

Expert System SpA, if Google Finance is accurate, about $2 a share. Roger, anaphora that.

Stephen E Arnold, March 7, 2016

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