Billions of people around the world create enormous amounts of new content daily, much of it destined never to be read because there is so much of it. Governments spew out heaps of information, classify it, and then destroy it. Every year corporations add half again as much data as they have to their databases and content stores. To be useful, this content needs to be processed, searched, harvested, and converted into other forms. Global companies must do the same for all the languages in which they produce information for internal and external consumption.
Internationalization specialist Basis and text mining software supplier TEMIS announced a partnership to manage more of this flood of content in more languages than either company could handle on its own. Their joint effort is meant to support the global content life cycle, a passage of content from creation, management, leverage, and ultimately destruction. Access, usage, and application are all critical elements of the life cycle, so powerful data and text harvesting techniques -- search, data mining -- are essential bits of managing information in whatever form an organization chooses to collect it.
Thus, globalization is part of any enterprise application and by definition a core business issue. It's this kind of partnership and technology integration that language tool suppliers need to forge with database, content management, search, ERP, and other enterprise software solution vendors. Otherwise, they're destined to support just the tail end of the global content life cycle -- and ultimately be elbowed out of a more strategic role.
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