ChartSearch: Natural Language Querying for Structured Data
January 19, 2010
On Friday, January 15, 2010, the goslings and I were discussing natural language processing for structured information. Quite a few business intelligence outfits are announcing support for interfaces that eliminate the need for the user to formulate queries. SQL jockeys pay for their hybrid autos because most of the business professionals with whom they work don’t know SELECT from picking a pair of socks out of the drawer. We have looked closely at a number of systems, and each of them offers some nifty features. We heard a rumor about some hot, new Exalead functionality. Our information is fuzzy, so we wish not to speculate.
One of the goslings recalled that a former Web analytics whiz named Chris Modzelewski had developed an NLP interface for structured data. You can check out his approach in the patent documents he has filed. These are available from the cracker jack search system provided by the USPTO. His company ChartSearch, provides software and services to clients who want to find a way to give a plain vanilla business professional access to data locked in structured data tables and guarded by a business intelligence guru flanked by two Oracle DBAs.
ChartSearch uses a variant of XML and a rules based approach to locating and extracting the needed data. Once the system has been set up, anyone with a knowledge of Google can fire off a query to the system. The output is not a laundry list of results or a table of numbers. The method generates a report. His patent applications describe the chart generator, the search query parser, the indexing methods, the user interface, the data search markup language, and a couple of broader disclosures. If you are not a whiz with patent searching, you can start with US20090144318 and then chase the fence posts down the IP trail.
What makes this interesting is that the method has been veticalized; that is, a version of ChartSearch makes it easy to handle consumer data and survey data, special enterprise requirements, and companies that “sell” data but lack a user friendly report and analytic tool.
The founder is a whiz kid who skipped college and then dived into data analytics. If you are looking for a natural language interface to structured data, ChartSearch might be worth a look.
Stephen E Arnold, January 19, 2010
Nope, a freebie. I don’t even visit New York very often, so I can’t call on ChartSearch and demand a bottle of water. Sigh. I will report this to the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. Water is important.
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
