Industries / Government

Early Warnings

Avert disaster and increase public health and safety

To avert crises or minimize their effects, government officials need to identify the signs of impending danger in order to take appropriate action. But often, agencies with oversight or monitoring responsibilities are not able to recognize patterns before a crisis because of the overwhelming amount of information coming at them, from a variety of different sources, including unstructured data from social media, consumer hotlines, testimony transcripts, public emergency call data, etc.

SAS lets government leaders take advantage of the growing volumes of unstructured information stored in agency repositories, plus open-source public information in blogs and other social media outlets, to identify and monitor potentially explosive situations, such as banking crises and political unrest. This gives government leaders the opportunity to develop risk mitigation strategies proactively rather than reactively.

" In hindsight, many of the major crises of the past decade seemed foreseeable if only pieces of information from various corners of the government had been brought together."

"ANALYSIS: Management Matters Complex Risks," GovernmentExecutive.com, January 1, 2010


How SAS® Can Help 

SAS allows organizations to automate the assessment of unstructured text data as part of ongoing analysis and monitoring, producing better insights into potential issues so that risk is mitigated by action. With SAS, you can:

  • Gain a more holistic, comprehensive view of potentially volatile situations. Marry statistical analysis on structured data with insights derived from unstructured data.
  • Receive early warnings when potential crises are brewing. Quickly search and analyze voluminous amounts of text data to identify and categorize emerging patterns.
  • Receive continuously updated information. SAS solutions are able to crawl and mine websites, blogs and internal file systems, incrementally adding new content to existing investigations.
  • Use all available information. Bring together disparate information sources for key contextual insights and examine the entire collection to understand the full scope of issues.

How SAS® Is Different 

SAS offers a more comprehensive and thorough perspective for discovering trends, threats and emerging issues, leading to more comprehensive analyses and better decisions. With SAS, you get:

  • A rich suite of tools for extracting knowledge from text documents, including a comprehensive text mining solution that integrates text-based information with structured data and predictive analytics for better answers to complex questions.
  • A combination of advanced statistical modeling, natural language processing and advanced linguistic technologies to quickly and automatically extract concepts and events from large volumes of multilingual content to discover trends, patterns and sentiments locked away in textual content.
  • The ability to fully exploit content assets and ensure reuse spanning disparate departmental repositories, no matter who owns the content or where it was generated.

Related Products and Solutions

SAS® Text Analytics

SAS Text Analytics provides a framework that enables organizations to maximize the value of information within large quantities of text that is generated, acquired or exists in repositories by extracting relevant information, and interpreting, mining and structuring information to reveal patterns, sentiments and relationships among documents.

SAS can help you discover insights from electronic text materials, associate them so they go to the right person or place, and provide intelligence to know what you need to do next – whether it's answering complex search-and-retrieval questions, ensuring appropriate content is presented to internal or external Web users, or what phrase is predicted to produce the best effect on existing sentiments.

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