SAS wants to make it easier for organisations to navigate unstructured, textual data archives with the launch of Industry Taxonomy Rules starter kits as add-ons to SAS Enterprise Content Categorization.

It claims that by providing much of the foundational product and service definitions, these prebuilt industry taxonomies cut the implementation time for text analytics from months to weeks.

With the starter kits, implementation teams can focus on building more complex rules for the organization’s document collection, classification and analysis. In the process, they can help decision makers quickly find the information they need in text data to respond to opportunities and issues and make better business decisions.

“A taxonomy defines the classification of documents into different categories, and when you build a taxonomy, you need to create rules to accurately classify your documents,” said Fiona McNeill, SAS Global Text Analytics Product Marketing Manager.

“Building taxonomies from scratch can be daunting. But with the new SAS Industry Taxonomy Rules starter kits, organisations get a jump start, and can move more quickly from document and text chaos to value and insight from their unstructured data.”

SAS Industry Taxonomy Rules starter kits will be available in more than 30 languages and target major industries such as banking and financial services, retail, health and life sciences, and automotive manufacturing.

The new starter kits include SAS-defined starter rules and baseline definitions from WAND Inc. to offer plug-and-play capability.

“SAS taxonomies offer attributes and attribute values in addition to concepts and terms,” said Ross Leher, CEO of WAND Inc. “The difference in clarity is like night and day. This level of detail goes well beyond the information conveyed in a headline or the first few sentences of a document. The SAS Industry Taxonomy Rules starter kits build upon WAND taxonomy expertise and help organizations quickly derive value from categorization. Thanks to their out-of-the-box implementation, ROI is almost immediate.”