I created this blog exactly 8 years ago in mid 2015. The aim was to share ideas, research, technologies and methods on text analytics, search and data management applied to geoscience.
This would hopefully stimulate and accelerate the exploitation of geoscience information by practitioners for the benefit of industry and society. It has gone from a 100 views in 2015 to over 400,000 total views in 2023 from 63 different countries.
Back in 2015 there were a couple of noteworthy policies and papers published for the big picture in earth science.
The United Nations (UN) Sustainability Development Goals (SDG) were published.
Geoscience is critical to delivering many of these goals, including clean water and affordable clean energy.
In terms of challenges, Acocella (2015) stated earth science can provide, “the crucial knowledge for the discovery, use, and conservation of natural resources, the definition and mitigation of the natural hazards, the geotechnical support of commercial and infrastructure development and the stewardship of the environment“.
Six grand challenges for earth science were outlined, including managing data.
Narrowing further, I was half way through my PhD in 2015. I had been interviewing, surveying, observing and experimenting with hundreds of geoscientists regarding how they search for information. Some of these quotes from geoscientists paint a picture of the situation back in 2015:
“I Google everyday. Certain things in our profession are hard to find”
“The big problem with Google is choosing the right selection of words to find something”
“It’s difficult to drill down into masses of information. I am constantly searching it is like I am doing nothing else”
“With analogues you don’t know what to search for as you don’t know what they are”
“I like this associative stuff, it’s like we need an algorithm for the bizarre”
“I want the search to show me something I don’t already know”
“Our company does not make it easier by having several similar search tools that search different sources”
“We are probably not good searchers. There is so much out there, we probably miss vital information. How do I know what I’m missing? Maybe we need automatic scanning tools that search for us while we are sleeping”
In subsequent posts later this year, I’ll revisit what has changed, what has improved, what challenges remain and new challenges that may have have emerged.
References
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2015.00068/full
A Geodyssey - Geoscience Text Analytics and Enterprise Search Research 
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