Overcoming Public Data Challenges with the Straive Data Platform

Posted on : August 4th 2021

Enterprises tend to employ data from external sources in their data strategy to convert insights into financial gain as they mature in their data journey. This external data comes in diverse forms. However, for enterprises, the most critical is public data.

Government entities and regulatory agencies like the Office of the Assessor, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and Secretaries of State to company and consumer websites, forums, and social media, have vast public data repositories. This public data has an array of intelligence that can be used across industries, domains, and functions to gain actionable insights. Hence, there is a burgeoning appetite among enterprises to incorporate public data into their data strategy. Nevertheless, the data needs to be extracted, massaged, and structured to be of any use.

The Challenges Faced By Enterprises in Using Public Data

There are many challenges in leveraging public data for gaining insights. For instance, it is unstructured and raw. Most of the content in the public space is not meant for structured consumption and analysis. The content has been developed as research-based and informative sources. The publication frequency is also highly variable, ranging from regular to annual, half-yearly, quarterly, to sometimes daily and hourly frequencies. Ordinarily, there is no specific cadence, standard, or format to enable data processing efficiently.

Further, with a vast number of sources and virtually anyone and everyone publishing content, it is an arduous task to establish the veracity of the published information. In addition, the quality and consistency of public data are poor. Besides, enterprises find it challenging to discover specific data in published content in subpages rather than on its homepage.

Straive’s Public Data Intelligence Solutions

Straive’s public data intelligence solutions enable enterprises to overcome the challenges associated with acquiring, enriching, and managing public data. The solutions, enhanced with source, process, and technical knowledge gained from processing public data at scale for hundreds of thousands of sites, can accelerate the incorporation of public data into your data strategy. Straive’s solution experts combined with the Straive Data Platform (SDP) help create valuable intelligence from picking the right source to extracting, structuring, and enriching public data. Our solution delivers organized data from websites, news articles, data feeds, and regulatory websites.

Straive’s public data intelligence solution has been used across information services, banking, insurance, and the real estate sectors in a multitude of use cases, including:

Information Services

• Collecting company reports, regulatory filings, and press releases to create comprehensive company profiles
• Building and maintaining comprehensive, up-to-date company data sets for competitive intelligence
• Identifying key contacts, such as executive leadership, procurement heads, and IT leaders, to help in sales and marketing activities
• Extracting legal and regulatory data from county court sites for legal intelligence
• Scraping clinical trial information, mapping, and enriching with other relevant information about life sciences companies, testing sites, and more

Banking & Insurance

• Creating digests, summarizations, and impact assessments from regulatory publications and guidelines
• Extracting and monitoring unsolicited consumer feedback from social media and forums
• Extracting court, legislative, and regulatory records for underwriting and risk assessment
• Tracking alternate data sources such as review sites and social media for small- and medium-sized business activeness indicators

Real Estate

• Extracting information from assessor, parcel, and county sites
• Collecting tenant information from building directories
• Extracting court, legislative, and regulatory records for underwriting and risk assessment
• Identifying different data points about a company by integrating data from various sources such as regulatory websites, stock exchanges, press releases, company websites, and newswires

Straive Data Platform—a One-Stop-Shop for Public Data Intelligence

Straive Data Platform is the foundation for our public data intelligence solution. The platform comprises multiple customizable microservices to solve unstructured data use cases at scale. The Straive Data Platform includes strategic frameworks, accelerators, tools, scripts, and technical capabilities, in addition to customizable extraction, transformation, enrichment, and delivery modules.

Key Differentiators of the Straive Data Platform

• Ability to extract and process data from websites in any format and complexity, including captcha and paginated sources. Highly advanced data extraction capabilities leveraging machine learning and natural language processing-based algorithms
• Automated identification of the correct URL from keywords or names and ability to navigate to the correct pages from the sitemap
• Highly configurable platform with the ability to monitor data sources, provide alerts for changes or new information
• Compliance check for permission to scrape data by checking robots.txt. Integrated robotic process automation model to extract data from websites that do not permit web-scraping
• Integrated translation engine for acquiring and translating content from non-English websites
• Supports repeatable scripts to extract data from multiple websites when the same entities are involved

In conclusion, the Straive Data Platform is a one size fit all public data intelligence solution suite. For modular services, the data platform includes loosely coupled modules built as microservices. These microservices interact via an Application-Programming Interface (API) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) framework, enabling programmatic communication and data transfer. Furthermore, auto-scaling and enterprise-grade service-level agreements ensure there are few start-up issues, thereby making the Straive Data Platform easy to use.

For the functional scope of activities, the Straive Data Platform comprises various functionalities to acquire, enrich, and manage unstructured data across multiple touchpoints. Enterprises employ the platform's patented architecture, which separates compute and storage, to speed up the data crunching and analysis process.