(Image source: Fluree.)
Fluree (Winston-Salem, N.C.) the provider of an immutable semantic graph data platform, has undertaken a technical partnership with Lead Semantics (Chapel Hill, N.C.) to provide a fully integrated solution, TextDistil, for enterprise data management teams looking to build semantic-capable, secure data fabrics. A key area of focus for the integrated solution includes highly regulated industries such as insurance, with a greater magnitude and scope of requirements needed to prove compliance.
The insurance industry relies overwhelmingly on unstructured data—particularly text—in its entire spectrum of activity, notes Brian Platz, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Fluree. “TextDistil’s NLP platform not only allows these documents to be analyzed quickly and applied to automated processes, but also placed into a digital audit trail, powered by Fluree’s immutable ledger,” Platz says.
“Whereas much of the insurance industry relies on trust, Fluree’s technology and its application to TextDistil in particular will allow the industry to digitize this trust in the form of complete and provable data traceability,” adds Platz. “In sum, the documents that power the insurance industry will be able to be understood, analyzed, and audited by various data management tools.
“This, in turn, will eliminate manual auditing processes and encourage well-informed decision making via intelligent and trusted document analysis,” Platz adds. “A few key use cases here include native—automated—auditing, trusted document sharing across insurance parties, fraud detection and prevention, and various analytical applications including sentiment analysis.”
Brian Platz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Fluree.
Lead Semantics’ natural language processing (NLP) technology, powered by Fluree’s semantic graph database, will help convert unstructured data assets (including text) into semantic-capable enterprise knowledge. With TextDistil, Lead Semantics and Fluree are essentially bringing unstructured data into the structured context of businesses’ respective operational transactional worlds with security, traceability, and audit-capabilities provided by Fluree’s immutable ledger, according to a joint statement on the partnership.
“Text to knowledge is the new frontier in building comprehensive enterprise data fabrics. While most organizations have wrangled structured or semi-structured data into a centralized data platform, unstructured data remains forgotten and underleveraged,” says Platz. “Within the confines of unstructured data may lie the cure for a rare disease, an audit trail of customer interactions for regulatory bodies, or the key to a previously unsolvable business logistics challenge. We are proud to provide the semantic graph database backing the TextDistil initiative, bringing trust, traceability, and interoperability to enterprise unstructured information.”
New data, both structured and unstructured, is being created at a seemingly insurmountable clip, stresses the statement on the partnership. IDC has predicted the Global Datasphere will grow from 33 zettabytes in 2018 to 175 zettabytes 2025, which amounts more than five times as much data available which needs to be protected and ideally codified and analyzed, within just a few short years. Unstructured data is estimated to make up 80 percent of all data. The business value of codifying and analyzing these data points is still not yet fully realized for most businesses, as this data can and should be leveraged as part of a company’s data fabric strategy.
TextDistil is designed to address the current market interest in text and knowledge graphs, turning text into data that provides context to support immutable transactions. Fluree says it seeks to bring trust and security to that data, which mitigates risk and extends data governance into unstructured enterprise information. The previously unstructured data becomes fully auditable with Fluree in addition to being secured, and is piped into a W3C-standard format for enterprise data fabrics, the vendor says.
Prasad Yalamanchi, Founder, CEO, Lead Semantics.
Fluree says it was selected by Lead Semantics because it is the only permissioned trust-based ledger database that has semantic underpinnings for integration to enable connected data insights and standard semantic querying. TextDistil, through its automated knowledge extraction, extends high fidelity tracing back to the source natural language text to provide governing context and auspices to the transactions that are recorded in the Fluree Ledger database. This thereby seamlessly enhances the automated audit trail to mitigate risk while improving data provenance, the vendor says.
Key benefits include the following:
- With TextDistil, free text becomes yet another stable source of data with ‘structure’ much like data from a relational database in an enterprise. This newly structured data can be extremely valuable from a research and development standpoint: for example, a data scientist may be able to uncover an entirely new data set to better tailor its product or solution to its customers’ needs.
- Fluree’s trusted ledger, integrated with TextDistil, can introduce new levels of automation to virtually every department of a modern enterprise, particularly in more highly regulated areas as previously noted, such as finance, legal affairs and human resources, as well as for project management activities. With the Fluree technology integration, companies using TextDistil will have secure and provable data, which is audit-friendly and can wrap legal contracts or business agreements with blockchain-grade traceability.
- Both follow standards-based data semantics, making them easily integratable. On the output side, TextDistil encodes text into knowledge according to a domain ontology. Thus, W3C semantic standards compliant knowledge-facts (RDF triples) are output to be loaded into Fluree Database enabling automatic semantic integration and standard SPARQL querying.
“Text as a source of knowledge and information is fundamental yet there aren’t any end-to-end solutions that tame the complexity in handling text,” comments Prasad Yalamanchi, Founder, CEO of Lead Semantics. “Extracting value from text assets is a top priority problem to solve while trusted Ledger Databases have gained enterprise acceptance. With an integrated tool to harness Text for all its embedded information and knowledge, a trusted Ledger Database will be very attractive to businesses.”