Text mining and visualization tools – Impressions of emerging capabilities

Innovation is the underlying foundation of today’s competitive economy and technological advancement. There is a plethora of text mining and visualization tools available on the market to facilitate the innovative process in uncovering “hidden nuggets” of information about emerging technologies.A high-level overview of some key text mining and visualization tools is presented in this paper to provide a comparison of text mining capabilities, perceived strengths, potential limitations, applicable data sources, and output of results, as applied to chemical, biological and patent information. Examples of tools to be discussed include sophisticated text mining software packages, some simpler full-text searching tools, and a few data visualization tools that could be integrated with the more sophisticated software packages and full-text searching tools. Included are comments on our impressions of applicability of these tools to different types of data sources, perceived strengths, potential limitations, and suggestions as to which user groups may benefit from these tools.