Tags and Tag clouds
Tags which in other words known as keywords provide a good means of capturing key terms within a content source (which in most cases is text based). Now there is no limits to one's imagination as to what all you can do with tags and tag clouds to derive inferences from an unstructured data source. One such imagination gone wild can be found at http://chir.ag/phernalia/preztags. This tracks the State of the Union addresses of US presidents to generate tag clouds. A casual researcher can have a quick glance to see how the government's policy has changed over the years. Now this can easily be extended to within domains having large unstructured data sources such as Insurance, Banks. Text miners can draw inferences on the type of claims filed by customers, the most common reason for claims etc. I shall write more on the advantages and disadvantages of this approach in the subsequent blog entries.
