Recently we had the pleasure of receiving a visit from Álvaro Vázquez, the latest winner of the Pentasoft Award for the Most Innovative Project of the Masters in Marketing, ICADE Business School.

Álvaro, a graduate in philology, wanted to delve deeper into his project on the importance of language and its significance in Internet use. For this reason, under the title "Big Data and Analysis of Language on the Internet", Álvaro explained his research process in detail from an enriching premise: "If markets are conversations, then words are their assets".

Álvaro introduced us to the role of language in the Internet, stretching back to its initiation phase, through Web 2.0 and all the way to Big Data and Social Intelligence. These last two disciplines are precisely the ones that get the most out of the true value of words and their meanings by using the analysis of unstructured data which are reflected on social networks, blogs and forums.

This value is not just limited to metric feeling or number of references, but it also evolves contextually. In order to clarify this point further, Álvaro listed numerous examples of how companies could benefit from this: from segmentation based on user's social data to sales prediction based on the community's behavior and, in less commercial areas, forecast of diseases, crime, traffic and weather conditions.

Naturally, we could not bring this presentation to an end without having a group discussion on the ethical perspective of Big Data: would it be possible to arrest a person before they commit a murder if the data indicates such crime will be committed? Can we choose whether to grant a mortgage based on the social graph analysis of the client?.

Although this is certainly a topic which has left us with many unanswered questions and unknown facts, there is some certainty that the language will remain to be an asset in conversations, and that Big Data will continue to be the best technique to extract its value.

At Pentasoft we have a long track record in analyzing our clients' databases through Business Intelligence, and we understand the importance of handling large volumes of information. If you are interested in finding out more, please read about the success stories we have implemented together with our clients.