I attended the 3 hour virtual summit on the Future of Geoscience hosted by the Geological Society of London today (10th June 2020). Over 1,000 people attended from as far afield as Indonesia, Pakistan, Canada and Milton Keynes! It was excellently led by Tom Backhouse and joined by a range of people representing different areas... Continue Reading →

Along with some colleagues I'm writing up a paper over the summer looking at the impact COVID-19 has had on Enterprise Search and Scholarly Search behaviour, with so many people working remotely. There are some fascinating patterns in the search engine usage logs. One pattern in particular was unexpected and significant. This could have theoretical... Continue Reading →

Spot where many of the lockdowns occurred due to COVID-19 and mass remote working started...

In 2015 we conducted an experiment to see how well people performed searching for geoscience information in an organization using search engines. In total 26 experienced staff from several countries in an exploration company participated using their own company information and subsurface search engine. To our knowledge, it was the first and remains the only,... Continue Reading →

Over 25 years ago Collins and Poras (1994) studied successful companies and noted their ability to often embrace what appear to be competing constructs. This may be akin to machine learning (statistical) and knowledge engineering (linguistics-taxonomies). On many occasions I've seen one 'camp' explain all the pitfalls of the other, without acknowledging the limitations of... Continue Reading →

Thirty years ago I started my MSc in Computing in Earth Sciences. Since then much of my time has been spent applying computing & data science to geoscience in industry. For the past ten years or so, my focus has turned to academia; further developing the information science to underpin Natural Language Processing (NLP), Taxonomy,... Continue Reading →

Interesting to compare Google search trends worldwide for different renewables over the past 3 months. The future appears bright.

People overestimate how good they are at searching using search engines. Whilst many search engine deployments have improved, issues remain that many searchers are oblivious to. For example, today (16th May 2020) I made the query 'peru ignimbrite' (a volcanic rock) to a well known scholarly search engine, 270 results were returned. I made the... Continue Reading →

Over the past few years, geoscience and data science knowledge was used to label over one million diverse geoscience sentences from public domain Internet sources (papers, reports, presentations etc.). The purpose was to identify clues for source rock, maturation, migration, hydrocarbon occurrence, reservoir, trap and seal as mentioned in unstructured text; in such a way they... Continue Reading →