Companies may be gathering and storing data, but unless that information is easily accessible, it can often be too difficult to analyze meaningfully. In response to that challenge, IBM has added data cataloging and data refining to its Watson Data Platform, an integrated set of tools, services and data on the IBM Cloud. The platform helps data scientists, developers and business teams glean relevant intelligence from data, as well as to easily access services such as machine learning, AI and analytics. It’s all aimed at helping developers and data scientists interpret and prepare enterprise data for AI applications, regardless of its structure or where it is located.
Research firm IDC predicts that by next year, nearly 75 percent of developers will build AI functionality into their apps. In addition, they also face making sense of increasingly complex data that must be securely and continually analyzed to power these apps.
Among the new offerings:
Data Catalog: A complete and easily searchable index of all structured and unstructured data resident in existing systems, cloud platforms and IoT data streams. Machine learning categorizes data and assigns metatags to efficiently organize it into searchable stores.
Data Refinery: Data is prepared, cleaned and processed for sharing, as well as for being absorbed into AI and machine learning apps. This offers faster discovery, visualization and sharing of data.
Analytics Engine: An Apache Spark and Hadoop service behaves as an intelligent repository for data, so users can see the size, value and creation of each piece of a large dataset.