If we were able to predict the future, there would be no need for gambling and Las Vegas would turn into the shiniest senior citizen city in the west. Unfortunately the world we live in has many variables. DATAVERSITY brought this information to us in their article, “The Road to Prediction: Using Unstructured Data.”
Collecting information from the past, identifying trends and developing a better understanding of what may happen in the future is as close as we can get.
Take the weather for instance. For years people have been relying on the Farmer’s Almanac. Sometimes I have to stifle a giggle when my mother makes some statement about the coming winter that she assumes is true because she read it in the Almanac. However, it is good to be reminded that the predictions made in that publication is based on years of data collection, monitoring and measuring. New data monitoring and measuring tools now allow meteorologists to create complex models that enable very accurate weather forecasting.
This is not that much different than the business world or healthcare. Learning from the data that has been collected is a huge step forward.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.
