One of the ideas I’ve been playing with in my data analysis skunkworks project is the concept of “Data Recommendations”.
The gist of it is that you can pretty easily show people data that they’ll probably find interesting if you know about a few instances of data that you know they already found interesting. It’s the same concept as Amazon showing you recommended items you might be interested in buying, but on homegrown data. In fact, the implementation could be as simple a Bayesian filter, but the data has to be in a common format that it’ll work against, which is the hard part.
I don’t think this is completely new, a few smart folks like Jeff Jonas over at IBM seem to be working on something similar, but it’s going to make analytics a whole lot more interesting for a whole lot more people. It really puts relationships front and center because that’s really what you’re setting up. A relationship from a person to anything that matches x, y and z, and leaving that relationship open to find new data as soon as it sees any that matches.
I’m a little surprised that this hasn’t been explored at all in any of the BI products that I”ve seen.
