Text Mining is a Service with Many Uses

We've been talking around Factiva about how text mining (i.e. extracting meaning from unstructured text) can benefit varied business use-cases. There are lots of great ideas swirling about and it's not entirely clear where it will land. But this much is clear to me, text mining has to be part of the future of information retrieval.

But text mining is a service or a process, not a product, so we aren't marketing "Factiva Text Mining" but we are going to look for ways to fold it into products.

Factiva has developed text mining capabilities and built products for media measuring and reputation management. But searching and alerting can benefit too from the philosophy of text mining.

(An aside: Wikipedia needs a better entry for text mining. Volunteers?)