Natural Language Access to Enterprise Data

38 AI MAGAZINE Today’s enterprises need to make decisions based on analyzing massive and heterogeneous data sources. More and more aspects of business are driven by data, and as a result more and more business users need access to data. Offering easy access to the right data to diverse business users is of growing importance. There are several challenges that must be overcome to meet this goal. One is sheer volume: enterprise data is predicted to grow by 800 percent in the next five years (Chuba 2012). The biggest part (80 percent) is stored in documents, most of them missing informative metadata or semantic tags (beyond date, size, and author) that might help in accessing them. A third challenge comes from the need to offer access to this data to different types of users, most of whom are not familiar with its underlying syntax or semantics. Unified Service Intelligence (USI) is a project of Siemens Corporation, Corporate Technologies and Siemens Energy focused on generating actionable insight from large bodies of data in the energy service domain. USI Answers, the focus of