I just attended the SAS Analytics Conference in Orlando Florida during which I gave a presentation on implementing the SAS Content Categorization Studio at USAID. I was able to pass on the very good news that we were able to put our Geographic Descriptor profile into production with more in the pipeline. My talk was based on my experience with implementing the SAS Content Categorization from planning to production. As such, I did not talk too much about writing profiles or code, but more on project management and workflow integration. If you are interested, I have attached the PowerPoint presentation that I used.
I attended a number of other presentations as well as the three-day course on Data Mining, all of which were interesting and useful. I would recommend the Data Mining course to other people who do not have statistical backgrounds but would like to get a handle on some of the techniques that are used in Text Mining. Gordon Linoff, the instructor was quite good at explaining these ideas in an accessible way.
The most exciting thing for me was being introduced to the new SAS Contextual Analysis tool. I had been saying to some of the other attendees at the conference that I wished for a way to blend the capabilities of both the SAS Content Categorization Studio and the SAS Text Mining and there it was in the SAS Contextual Analysis tool just being unveiled at the conference. I didn’t see a page for it on the SAS site, so I do hope that you SAS folks will let us know when we can see more about this intriguing development in the SAS product line.
