To hell with context, give me subtext!
　　By JobMachine
　　
　　I’ve been racking my brain lately trying to understand why some aspects of Competitive Intelligence (especially in the Human Capital space) simply can not be automated. As many of you know my team and I have already solved the problem of automating much of our Secondary Research with robots that gather Internet Research and process data on a continuous basis 24/7 365 (see Rob's article on ERE http://digbig.com/4fgxf). Since that is now working (with very little blowback and only a few minor ongoing adjustments) I have been brainstorming on how to proactively automate the gathering of the deeper Business Intelligence we do.
　　
　　This deeper primary research BI data can only be obtained via either HUMINT or through assembling pieces of dissociative information from the Internet. Collecting this highly complex data from a myriad of online sources and assembling it into one relevant piece of useful information is an extremely manual, labor intensive process. It requires something which is not yet obtainable from a computer and that is the ability to creatively interpret subtext.
　　
　　Context is the physical text surrounding a word, sentence or paragraph. In other words, its explicit therefore you can physically read context and thus a search engine could index keywords against it. Subtex, however, is the implicit or underlying meaning of text. You can not “read” subtext, it must be interpreted though either inference, intuition, knowledge of the stated subject matter, educated guessing or by making assumptions as a result of logical leaps. This kind of soft information must still be creatively interpreted by a human with enough knowledge of the landscape to be able to make logical leaps.
　　
　　Search engines have not yet been able to infer meaning from the pages they index. I’m waiting, with baited breath, for a solution that approaches the artificial intelligence needed to successfully extract “meaning” from pages. I have hopes MSN will solve it first MSN’s SRC shows promise: http://rwsm.directtaps.net/but regardless of who does it, the sooner the better! And I don’t mean a search engine that can summarize keywords. I mean one capable of extracting the subtext of the written message. This would then allow me to plug in the final piece – adding information like what can be collected from a tertiary source (articles, published research, news, TV, references, bibliographies) to our phone and Internet research. With that we could then have a small cadre of very smart analysts winnowing all relevant information and interpreting what’s left so we can make some exceptionally targeted Human Capital decisions.
　　
　　By the way, if you want to be part of this, I’m seeking an Elicitation expert to join my team. If you love gathering Primary Intelligence via HUMINT, Social Engineering and Interviewing but without using Pretexting or Rusing, and you want a job that will get you leaping out of bed in the morning, you HAVE to check this Job out: http://digbig.com/4fgwy