This is a review of an interesting article written by Daniel Phelps as the Leader, Information Mining Group, at Eastman Kodak Company several years back. He talks about Emerging Trend Detection in Text Data Mining and his suggestion on how an ETD tool would work in an ideal scenario includes:
1. Raw data processed into useful information
2. Sufficient information processed to meet current need.
3. No irrelevant information presented.
4. All information available immediately when needed.
5. Information prioritized for the current need
6. Information presented in a format that is intuitively easy to understand.
7. Information can be viewed at different levels of detail.
8. Information can be viewed from multiple perspectives.
He mentions the objective of ETD to provide an automated alert when new developments are happening in a specific area of interest.
An event may be because of an underlying development. Whether the development is important is determined based on the situation and the particular information needs of the person evaluating the data. The speed to detect and to enable a response is what sets ETD tools apart. ETD tools generally have a user interface to navigate the trends, data and summaries. They are usually customized too from client to client. ETD tools involve knowledge management and text mining. Primarily they include what is a necessary for a decision maker to look at developments and make a call.