Innovative Routines International (IRI), Inc., has announced a new graphical tool to quickly and inexpensively capture information in unstructured data sources, or what Gartner calls "dark data."

According to Gartner Analyst Douglas Laney "enterprise dark data" is "unutilized or underutilized information, collected generally for a single purpose — then forgotten or archived." Laney posits that "Organizations have capitalized on this treasure trove of internal emails, contracts, reports and other types of data by looking for patterns, leading indicators and correlations."1

To help enterprises leverage their dark data, IRI has released an "Unstructured Data" edition of its IRI NextForm software. The 4-figure data migration product finds, structures, manipulates, and reports on, data in: text, MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files; PDF, RTF, and XML documents; and, email repositories. 

Inside the IRI Workbench GUI, built on Eclipse, the NextForm data restructuring wizard searches unstructured files on networked drives for keywords and patterns using regular expressions. It scans the sources to identify, associate, extract, and send the matches (along with optional forensic metadata) to a flat file. It also creates data definition file (DDF) metadata for IRI software products in the same GUI to use in data integration, replication, federation, remapping, masking, reporting, and franchising applications.

This technology and its Eclipse environment also support:

1. joining the search results with data in structured repositories (e.g., DBs) for analysis
2. development of domain-specific semantic ontologies through the DDF metadata
3. discovery of changes in, and key relationships between, the data, plus master data
4. data visualization tools like BIRT, and analytic engines like R, in the same GUI

http://www.iri.com/