Lucky Sort is building a visualization and navigation engine called TopicWatch meant for discovering patterns in live data streams. Information overload may soon become a thing of the past with this new product. Imagine sifting through social media, government filings, news, and commentary in real time, on your iPad.

Tech Crunch brought this fascinating information to our attention in their article, “Lucky Sort Grabs Half A Million For Big Data Visualization On Web & iPad.” TopicWatch is not yet another sentiment analysis or social listening platform and it isn’t just for public data. Users are also able to import their own text content into the platform, and then analyze that alongside other data. The system uses NLP (natural language processing) that favors statistics and user input over ontologies. This is a radical concept for those of us who believe in the value of a solid ontology. It will be interesting to see how this works out.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.