DataSift’s new analysis engine makes sense of social media data

DataSift is known for analyzing massive data sets to help companies understand what consumers are saying about them, and today it’s taking a big leap forward with the launch of its VEDO FOCUS engine, which the company says is capable of accurately classifying social media data into nearly half a million topics for easy perusal.

By looking at a set of over one billion facts for comparison, DataSift’s new text-classification engine reads and understands natural language content, and categorizes social media, news and blog posts from sources like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Bitly, Tumblr and more into a hierarchical taxonomy of over 450,000 topics. This makes it easier to build apps to interpret all that data at scale.

DataSift says that the FOCUS’ capabilities will allow analytics companies to filter data that includes their brand names (like ‘Gap’ or ‘Match’) and look at only those posts that relate to their industries.

FOCUS users will also be able to create social data sets for their domains or industries and look at them to see how their social marketing campaigns and reach stack up against the competition.

“Big Data isn’t helpful if working with it feels like a big mess. DataSift is leveraging their experience in the unstructured social data space to attack an important challenge for the industry as a whole,” says Nick Nyhan, CEO, WPP Data Alliance. “It’s like providing measuring spoons and recipes for those who want to learn how to cook with this data more quickly and accurately.”

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With the launch of FOCUS, DataSift, which processes more than 2 billion online interactions a day, believes that it will help developers worry less about data analysis infrastructure to get to insights faster.