Delighted to receive the 2018 Runner Up Prize for the International iSchools Doctoral Dissertation Award. The first time a Scottish university has been recognized for its dissertation. The awards recognize outstanding work in the information field; specifically the relationship between information, people and technology. My dissertation topic was enterprise search and discovery. Nominations are solicited... Continue Reading →
Using Streamgraphs to visualize results from geological text analytics
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 →
Geological Expressions: Clustering the results of text analytics for exploratory data analysis.
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 →
Applying Deep Learning to Geoscience Image Type Classification in Literature: Some Early Research Findings.
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 →
Short enterprise search queries: Are users really to blame?
Some practitioners state that users in an enterprise search deployment enter a much smaller number of words in a search query (1.5 average) than on the Internet (3.0 average) and infer it as one of the causes for poor outcomes. This short article presents an argument that this enterprise search user behaviour rather than being... Continue Reading →
The Contradiction & Emergence Engine
This is a general discussion of some ideas I have been formulating for some time on an associative 'Geo-Brain', going back to the work I did in 2014 on serendipitous information discovery. It is becoming commonplace to extract occurrences of entities in document/literature text, their association with other entities and numerical values. This can generate... Continue Reading →
Towards Cognitive Computing Assistants in Geoscience
Presentation given at the Geological Society of America (GSA) Annual Conference in Seattle this week (Geoinformatics session). Click here for Slideshare
PhD Judged “Top 5” Internationally for Information Science.
Surprised and delighted to be informed that my PhD has been judged in the "Top 5" Internationally in 2017 for Information Science in the ProQuest Doctoral Dissertation Award. My thesis topic was Re-examining and re-conceptualising enterprise search and discovery. The Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) scope includes any PhD related to, “the production,... Continue Reading →
Online Searcher
Delighted to have made the front cover for Sep/Oct 2017 issue
Applying sentiment analysis to oil & gas company reports.
I presented at the International Society of Knowledge Organization (ISKO) this week, sharing findings of an exploratory study. A Knowledge Organization System (KOS) was automatically applied to the annual company reports of four similar sized oil and gas companies to detect forward-looking strong and hesitant sentiment, in order to detect rhetoric, social phenomena and predict... Continue Reading →
A Geodyssey - Geoscience Text Analytics and Enterprise Search Research 