Sometimes, managing your data is a lot like being between the devil and the deep blue sea.
When the world expects more information, what it really expects is information that is beefed up, information that is very current, and information that has more context. While it sounds a bit intimidating to keep up with such tall expectations, with a smidge of smart work and hard discipline – it doesn’t have to be. The real challenge, however, lies in maintaining the data at the same level of accuracy even over a small period of time.
Data by its very nature is fungible and ever-changing. It cannot stay under control. Well, you knew that. But what do you do?
Traditionally the data manager’s answer to that question is to periodically review and refresh the information. It’s a cost and effort-intensive exercise and in the bygone times of the pre-internet era, doing this once a year was considered a solid industry practice.
However the new age is all about ‘instant gratification’ and even the new generation of corporate users expect all data to be current and contextualized, ready to consume. Not having data at that level could mean losing users and competitive advantage – an inevitable spiraling down. You desperately need a magic wand to fix things. Now, what do you do?
It turns out there is something close to a magic wand. The Internet.
The Internet has rapidly become a repository of all known content. Do you know that 90% of world’s data was created in the last three years? And that the Internet data is doubling every year and is expected to do so for some time to come. This can be your magic wand and leveraged to work in your best interest.
Perhaps, you are skeptical. You’re probably thinking about this magic wand and know how it comes with its own curses. It does require your team to pull off three Herculean tasks to make it work in the real world. Finding the relevant data sources in this haystack is the first colossal task. Once that’s done, to filter out only those that are credible, current, and open is the next. Last but not least, managing the different formats, aggregation challenges, collating and making sense of the unstructured data jungle on the Internet is the third challenge to overcome.
Naturally, the end-user is oblivious to all this and wants the unstructured data to structured data in the form of actionable knowledge, and right now, as usual.
The good news is that you don’t need Hercules to come to your rescue now; Xtract.io has gotten this problem covered for you. We’ve been in the business of discovering data on the web, filtering out the right content, and extracting actionable knowledge from the confusing maze of web content for a decade and a half now. We do this through Machine learning-based data extraction and automated data validation.
Our latest automation platform, Worxtream with its 100+ custom-built solution bots like data discovery bots, data collection bots, data validation bots and more are designed to solve this challenge for you, in three simple-to-understand steps:
- Discover, validate, and bookmark the credible ‘home’ sources for your data by scouring every corner on the internet.
- Customize our bots and workflow to track and extract new information and modifications to keep your data current and relevant.
- Provide flexible solution options to seamlessly integrate with your enterprise workflow to intelligently update your date using the power of AI.
For one of our customers, we refresh a 10 million strong data set over a quarter, with about 200K records refreshed every single day. Each record has more than 20 fields that change by category, tracked from multiple web sources. All this is accomplished through a fully automated data validation process, for only a fraction of their original internal cost!
At Xtract.io, we track and maintain more than a million such records a day, across different industry use cases, and each one is a true digital transformation story.
Automated data maintenance helps you track the health of your record periodically. Do reach out to us for a free, no-strings-attached consultation, where we can discuss if your data can benefit from our automated data validation process. There are high chances that we have been there and done that for your specific use case and can share our insights.
2 Comments
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Thanks for reading.