A research paper I co-authored with Laura Muir, Associate Professor at the School of Computing Edinburgh Napier University has been published this week in the Journal of Knowledge Organization. It is being increasingly recognized that sentiment analysis is a key part of enterprise search & discovery capability. We applied sentiment analysis to public oil company... Continue Reading →

Measuring user satisfaction with an enterprise search tool can be difficult. Feedback mechanisms on the user interface tend to only capture a small self-selected sample that may be skewed towards negative views. Whilst surveys can capture more data, they are also self-selecting and tend to be small scale compared to actual enterprise usage. Clickthrough data... Continue Reading →

Along with 450 academics and practitioners, I attended the iSchools Transforming Digital Worlds conference this week at the University of Sheffield. Some fascinating presentations on information behaviour, information seeking and information retrieval. I was particularly interested in the keynote from  Dr Lynn Connaway. Many of the messages although not new and perhaps well known to some,... Continue Reading →

I gave a lecture this week on search & analytics to students on the online Petroleum Data Management course at Robert Gordon University. Some excellent discussions, debate, questions and a thoroughly enjoyable session with knowledgeable students mostly in full time employment from around the world. My topic was 'Beyond the Search Box and Ten Blue Links'.... Continue Reading →

Geoscience-aware text sentiment algorithm improves on out-of-the-box specific sentiment tools like IBM Watson, Google, Microsoft and Amazon by over 30% for geoscience sentiment in text. Presented early research findings today at the Janet Watson ‘Big Data in the Geosciences’ conference at the Geological Society of London. Google opened proceedings with a talk on Satellite Imagery... Continue Reading →

Figure 1 - Frequency of Geological Concept 'Mentions' in text Co-occurring with Petroleum Systems Elements by Geological Time. Streamgraph (stacked area chart) Sankey Curves; Three visualizations shown for the ssame data: Silhouette [left], expanded [centre], zero-offset [right]. Extraction from 40 public domain articles using Python/RawGraphs. The 'dark layers' are associated to source rock, organic lithologies... Continue Reading →

In previous articles I have discussed how concepts can be detected and extracted from text. The patterns of these concepts (such as their proportions with respect to other concepts) provide a signature or 'expression' that can be compared. That could be at a 'micro' scale such as a Geological Formation or a 'macro' scale such... Continue Reading →

Before I delve into this topic, I'll start with a story that led me here. This year I went on a fossil hunting expedition with my family to the Dorset coast in the UK. We spent several hours scanning the beach performing our usual 'pattern recognition' to look for 'flying saucer' shaped pebbles of a... Continue Reading →