... With information trapped in the tailored database schemas of systems of record, operational data stores, data warehouses and data marts, it is no wonder organizations continue to struggle to make sense of it all – despite decades of effort and innovation.

Performing some kind of federated search over all these disparate data sets just has not ever delivered. In fact, federated search bites when it comes to sensemaking because the diverse data structures are incapable of supporting a sensemaking function.

If you want to be smart, you will want to jam the available, diverse, observational space into the same data structure and in as close to the same physical space as possible.

Data is data.

When reference data, transactional data, and even user queries are colocated in the same data structures and is the same indexes as the extracted features from text, video, biometrics, and so on … something very exciting happens: data naturally finds data and context can accumulate.

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Long story short, when this general sensemaking system came on-line it started finding marketing hosts comping their roommates and lots of other unanticipated novel discovery. So much novel discovery, it earned the name Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness or NORA, we got two rounds of funding, IBM bought my company to get its hands on the technology, and the rest is history.

Simply said, you have to have a brain (multi-purpose, general structure) to think (sense make). Then with a brain, the smartest you are going to be is a function of what observations you have properly contextualized into that meat space between your ears.