Calendar 2005
Seminar: Intelligent retrieval - search technology brought to life
Monday 7th November 2005 at The Radisson, Edinburgh
Review of the evening, written by Steve Borley
Monday 7th November 2005 at The Radisson, Edinburgh
Review of the evening, written by Steve Borley
Text-mining is easy, right? Wrong. The Scottish Information Network seminar on the 7th November 2005 showed that in many ways the search functionality today's information professional is familiar with can and will become much, much more sophisticated.
The evening brought together two of the information world's leaders in pushing back the boundaries of search technology - both in terms of developing new tools and in innovative applications of this technology.
Prof. Ewan Klein from the Edinburgh University School of Informatics opened the evening with a presentation outlining the research he is currently undertaking. He is working in the field of biomechanics and trying to help researchers in this field keep up to date with the vast amount of new material that is published every day. Prof. Klein outlined some of the problems in this field: namely the use of the same label to mean a range of linked-but-different things, and the annoying if amusing habit of researchers in the field to give new discoveries hard to find names: I mean, how does one go about text-searching for a protein called 'The'?
Prof. Klein led us through the some of the problems and issues his research is attempting to resolve, plus gave us a valuable insight into some of the work his team is doing to try and develop a text-mining solution for this challenging field.
Prof. Klein was followed by Chris Shaw, Global Practice Director of Factiva Insight. Factiva Insight are a suite of products that extract information from text held in press and journal articles, on websites and occurring on blogs. The really clever bit is how, but putting this all together in the right way, the user can gain some valuable insight into the emerging trends in opinion forming out there on the web and in blogs that all-too-quickly find their way into more mainstream press articles. Chris explained how his main user group is currently the communications and PR professional: they love having the ability to spot emerging trends that relate to their companies and being able to react to them before the mainstream publicity kicks into gear. They also love the short cut to emerging trends that can help their businesses strategies develop.
Chris' work at Factiva was a fascinating counter-point to Prof. Klein's emerging, academic work. Chris demonstrated that the search technologies we have today can and are being applied in innovative ways that cut the time it takes to distil valuable information from an ocean of text. And Prof. Klein clearly demonstrated that there is more to come and that we still have great strides to make in terms of the sophistication of text-mining techniques. Prof. Klein is in the vanguard in making these strides, and Factiva shows that there are forward-thinking firms out there who will be able to make these developments work for the information professional.
As ever, the presentations were followed by a lively and enjoyable session where everyone was able to meet, talk and exchange ideas having been inspired by a seminar covering cutting edge issues, giving us all something to think about.