Article from www.solutions-numeriques.com for the Data Intelligence Forum

During the Data Intelligence Forum, held jointly with the Documation trade fair at Porte de Versailles in Paris on 6 and 7 April, French company iScope presented the latest version of KeyWatch, its strategic intelligence tool. The software is capable of presenting data in the form of maps, which can be browsed to select useful information at any given time. It meets the needs of many activities, including marketing, strategy, innovation and R&D and communication.

KeyWatch has a variety of users, monitoring copyrights for Sacem, processes and technologies for the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), and crisis situations for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Speaking at the Data Intelligence Forum, Thierry Régnier, Associate Director of iScope, explained that the system can be used to collect information from the web, including extremely complex data, with session numbers, usernames and passwords, etc. The tool then automatically categorises the data collected into categories that range from “extremely precise to large-scale”. Thierry Régnier gives the example of big data use for one of its many clients, a “credit insurance expert” for whom the tool targets 1 million URLs, searches 38,000 companies and performs 80,000 automatic queries every day. Categorised data can be automatically or manually reproduced, as newsletters and e-mail alerts, or communicated in portals or on RSS feeds, etc. “KeyWatch takes intelligence to a new level and can easily process web content on highly fluctuating issues, generally using identified sources.” Google cannot be used for this kind of data collection. Mapping is more than just the presentation of data to discover what’s new. “Once data has been categorised, it is archived and can be accessed even one or two years later. It is mapped to show links between people, places, themes and companies, demonstrating how these aspects have changed over time.”

It is especially useful for companies not wanting to fall behind, helping them to discover new concepts and other innovations!

The methodology and technologies developed by iScope (with the graphical component from Nantes-based company Atelier Iceberg) present data in an effective and user-friendly way, ensuring that information can be used right away. “One of the problems of data visualisation is that the data is generally difficult to use and that we often only see what we already know. This is about looking for information, browsing data and discovering new facts. That’s our ultimate aim.”

Good data visualisation that can be easily shared with a board while presenting a report “requires, from the offset, highly rigorous, well-structured and extremely well automated data and a uniform and comprehensive corpus – otherwise we’ve missed it,” warns Mr Régnier.

He continues, “We have implemented components that can easily generate maps of innovation, business, managers and key business practices. We combine these for a multi-dimensional presentation of data which can be browsed to select useful information at a given time, highlighting any weak signals.”

Listening to Thierry Régnier reminded us of the Linkurious visualisation platform, which won an award at the fair (see our article: Linkurious, a visualisation tool for the Panama Papers, receives first prize at the Data Intelligence Awards) and was used by journalists to analyse the huge mass of data leaked during the Panama Papers affair… Could these two companies pool their respective know-how? We asked the Associate Director of iScope, who did not deny that this was a possibility…