Text mining adds structure to text so that voluminous collections of text in emails, Web sources, RSS feeds or blogs can be analyzed and tracked. Enterprises use it for monitoring and tracking customer interactions and opinions. Governments find it invaluable for intelligence work--to track terrorists and criminals and discover their relationships to each other. Some of these techniques are also used to improve search, browsing and interactions for customer self help, ecommerce or in search engines.

"Text mining is a set of technologies for delving into large collections of text in order to discover trends and relationships," said Sue Feldman, VP for Content Technologies at IDC. "Today's early adopters are using text mining to fill the gaps in business intelligence-to find the missing "Why" behind the data. They are mining their CRM systems to find out causes for customer churn, and their email collections for compliance monitoring. New tools for visualizing the results of text mining, joined with business intelligence tools will be adopted rapidly. They are too valuable to ignore."