OpenText unveils Election Tracker '16 bringing Big Data approach to U.S. race

Waterloo’s OpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTC) has unveiled Election Tracker ‘16, an online tool that automatically scans thousands of news articles posted to global media outlets on candidates running in the U.S. presidential election, presenting the results in an interactive visualization that offers users insights into how Big Data sees the race.
Election Tracker ’16 uses OpenText Release 16 (Process Suite, Content Suite, and Analytics Suite) to analyze unstructured data to place key trends and stats into an interactive dashboard.
“Analyzing both structured and unstructured data provides a full picture of any situation to enable smarter, data-driven business decisions,” said Adam Howatson, chief marketing officer at OpenText. “Election Tracker ’16 evaluates election news coverage, using the articles themselves as a source of unstructured data. OpenText technology actually analyzes the content of the unstructured data, much in the way a human would, only much faster and with a perfect memory and better aggregate insight over massive volumes. Election Tracker ’16 is a working example of unstructured data analysis in action and showcases its ability to provide a solution to an increasingly common business concern across all industries.”
The Election Tracker tool can compare candidates based on mentions relating to particular topics, history, geography or sentiment, with the topics, representing key election issues, dynamically generated from news coverage.
In the past two presidential campaigns, the Obama campaign made smart use of social media and data analytics, drawing on a centralized database of voter information to better guide decisions relating to media buy placements, voter outreach and fundraising.
“Using electiontracker.us, election enthusiasts are able to gain a holistic view of how candidates are performing based on media sentiment, which can be a more accurate indication of future success, says OpenText CEO Mark Barrenechea. “Election Tracker ‘16 is built using OpenText Release 16, which includes Process Suite (read, scan, sentiment), Content Suite (store), and Analytics Suite (visualize and predict), bringing seemingly unstructured data to life.”
For OpenText, Election Tracker ’16 works as a demonstration of how companies can harness the power of data analysis, scanning documents, websites, social feeds such as Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, PDF archives, RSS feeds and blogs, to provide insight and contextualize information in an interactive real-time dashboard that visualizes sentiment, discussion and trends.
“Analytics has made its way into every industry and has become a part of everyday life,” says Barrenechea. “Just as candidates look for a competitive advantage to help them win, so too must businesses. Research shows that organizations that are data driven are more profitable and productive than their competitors. Analytics and reporting solutions help organizations become data driven by extracting value from their business data and making it available across the enterprise to facilitate better decision making.”