Open Source and Text Mining on a Collision Course
April 18, 2008
Open source intelligence or OSI is moving from the canvas barriers at US government facilities into the business mainstream. Open source is generally understood to mean “accessible via the Internet”, but it is a relatively low-profile discipline. Many of the experts in this type of research avoid the spot light. The “father” of open source intelligence is Robert Steele.
JasperSoft–a company that describes itself as “the market leader in open source business intelligence–announced a partnership with Microsoft to ensure that JasperSoft’s business intelligence (BI) solutions work well on Windows platforms, according to Internet News.
The ability to “suck” data into a widely-deployed system opens new opportunities for analysts and competitive intelligence practitioners. The JasperSoft
A key new initiative is JasperSoft’s Connect product. An analyst can use Windows products as a front-end to the JasperSoft’s data analysis server. The value of this approach is that the cost of open source analysis can be sharply reduced.
Consolidation in the for-fee content sector may put a restrictor plate on some open source initiatives. For example, the merger of Thomson with Reuters–a deal valued at $17 billion–means that data accessible via the Internet will almost certainly be placed under tighter access controls. If this occurs, commercial information and data that find their way to publicly-accessible Web sites will require a fee to access. Improper use of information owned by such multi-national professional publishing giants like Thomson, Reed Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, and Springer-Verlag will lead to restrictions, fees, and possibly legal action.
As a result, wider use of open source intelligence with lower-cost tools such as those from JasperSoft will trigger greater restrictions on high-value information. Awareness of open source and consolidation in the professional publishing and news sectors may collide with unknown consequences.
Open source has disrupted traditional military intelligence methods, and it may pose a similar challenge to professional publishing companies. Open source has increased the pressure on commercial software companies, which have not been able to quell interest in community-supported products like Apache, a widely used Web server. Publishing companies, already threatened by sharply decreasing revenues and rising costs, are likely to respond more quickly and more aggressively than software vendors.
Stephen Arnold, April 18, 2008
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