It’s taken me 6 months elapsed time, but I have finally finished manually labelling 25,000 (yes - twenty-five thousand!) petroleum geoscience sentences from global public domain sources. I’m using these to experiment training a machine learning classifier which, using deep context, can predict the topics of any passage of geoscience text hitherto unseen by the... Continue Reading →

When presented with large volumes of text there are a number of techniques when applying text analytics. I developed the DMA Model as a simple conceptual way to categorize the main types. Rules based or machine learning techniques can be used individually or together for each of these 3 areas: Document Centric This scenario occurs... Continue Reading →

New research published this week for Enterprise search. Insights from the petroleum, life sciences, aerospace, intelligence services, manufacturing, retail and legal sectors for digital transformation. In many respects Enterprise Search & Discovery may have become part of the Corporate Exobrain. Complementing tacit networks allowing individuals and teams to extend brainpower by searching and exploiting explicit... Continue Reading →

Understanding a word by the company it keeps (Firth 1957) and the Distributional Hypothesis (Harris 1954) - words that occur in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings - are concepts that have been with us for over a half a century. However, in the past few years we have seen a remarkable body... Continue Reading →

Delighted to be appointed Visiting Professor of Information Science & Technology at RGU. An exciting time for studying the intersection between search & discovery in the enterprise, advanced analytics and human behaviour.

I was in Healdsburg, California this week with the GeoScienceWorld team. Some very interesting demonstrations from the University of Kansas discussing text mining to support research questions such as "what causes bioerosion fluctuations through geological time?" which is important for oil and gas reservoir quality. Healdsburg is 70 miles north of San Francisco in the Sonoma Valley... Continue Reading →

My review of Wu and Liang's Book - Mobile Search Behaviors: an in-depth analysis based on contexts, apps and devices (review published in JLIS) is now on OpenAir (RGU's Open Access site). https://openair.rgu.ac.uk/handle/10059/3428  

Some of the fossil shark teeth I found recently from the Peace River in Florida. Megalodon (large), Lemon Shark (top left), Sand Tiger Shark (bottom middle narrow), others include Tiger Shark, Snaggletooth Shark and Stingray. Miocene to Early Pliocene age (23-5 Million years ago) when most of Florida was submerged. You stand in the river... Continue Reading →

The write up from the expert centric digital technology seminar in January 2019 is now on the Finding Petroleum website Proceedings A good write-up of my presentation and feedback.

I conduct research on pattern recognition in geoscience unstructured text. But nothing can beat the real thing! A half broken Ichthyosaur Vertebra I found last month from the dark mudstones, clays & marls of the Liassic on the Dorset coast in England. Palaeontology is after all about pattern recognition. Looking for specific patterns (deductive) but... Continue Reading →