The Nexis Data as a Service (DaaS) team does more than provide clients with datasets. Just ask Viji Alagarsamy, Director of Product Management, DaaS. She’s worked with her colleagues at Nexis DaaS for the past three years. And if it’s one thing she’s quick to point out, it’s that most of her clients only think they’re looking for nothing more than a data vendor. The reality is that, more often than not, clients are looking for solutions to business and research problems they believe having access to the right data will help them solve.
But an abundance of raw data only creates more work, more complexity—and more headache. Fortunately, the Nexis DaaS team excels at providing data solutions. Not just data itself. In a recent sit-down interview, Viji shared with us what she believes to be the Nexis DaaS differentiators that set it apart from other offerings. When we asked her what she felt to be the biggest Nexis DaaS benefit as a solution, she didn’t hesitate to answer.
“We’re able to power our customers’ solutions through our superior data and enrichments, says Viji. “That’s our core bread and butter.”
As Viji goes on to explain, the datasets that Nexis DaaS provides access to serve as the foundation of what she and her team offer Data quantity is one thing. Any third-party data provider will be measured by the sheer number of content sources and datasets it can serve up. And while no other provider offers access to more data from more sources than Nexis DaaS (its datasets are approaching 44 zettabytes in size), Viji and her team are much more interested in serving as partners to their clients above all else. An important cornerstone of its partnerships is taking the extra step to make its unmatched wealth of data immediately valuable to clients—so that they can focus more on data discovery and less on data wrangling.
“We enable analytics and informed decision-making for our customers,” says Viji. And she points out several times during the interview that this is a differentiator that wouldn’t be possible without the intelligent data enrichment process behind Nexis DaaS.
An overview of the data enrichment process
Sourcing and licensing premium content
The data enrichment process starts by identifying trusted third-party data sources. These sources are a mix of premium and open web content, all of which are in some way relevant to business and academic research use cases.
Resolution and normalization
Once a third-party data source is deemed trustworthy, its disparate data types are transformed into clean, semi-structured datasets ready for consumption. The normalization of data from a data source is a continuous process to maintain quality.
Data enrichments
Once the data is normalized, the Nexis DaaS team applies enrichments via its SmartIndexing™ technology. Using over 125 metadata descriptive tags (along with 300 subject topic tags and more than 3,800 industry tags), this technology classifies articles based on subjects, industries, companies, organizations, people, and places, so that users can apply filters, reduce noise, and quickly find the most relevant information they need.
Data delivery
Finally, the data is delivered to an on-premises solution through one of several intuitive, flexible APIs. Users can choose from:
- Bulk delivery APIs
- RESTful APIs
- Constant call APIs
And staying true to its desire to serve as a partner to their clients, the Nexis DaaS team works alongside them to make sure that the APIs are deeply integrated into the client workflow for maximum benefit.
Conclusion
Nexis DaaS can provide, clients with enriched, semi-structured, and normalized content ready for their business intelligence and analytics platforms. But more importantly, these data enrichments set the stage for an efficient and easy integration, so clients can focus more on what they want to accomplish with their data. Learn more about Nexis DaaS here.