“RE: Do You Know Anything About...”

On 2/12/05, Brian Carnell said:

>Is he frustrated by searches he's doing on a remote database (such as
>Lexis or Medline) or searches he's doing on locally stored info?

All of the above, and I've intentionally understated the problem and left out the context so as to save him any, uh, weirdness.

My post started out as a bit of amusement over the question he asked me. I let it drift a little, though.

Let me tell you, Brian, that this guy's field needs lots of people with your obsession for categorizing and organizing data. I don't believe there's any field dealing with information overload worse than these guys.

His organization was almost sold an incredibly expensive piece of software. The salesperson claimed that it could analyze and "understand" large sets of documents and transactions, and formulate useful responses to natural language queries.

This is what we call "the holy grail." As someone else said to me today when we were discussing this, there have been lots of smart people working on this problem for many years, and so far they haven't come up with much.

So far, computers can organize and categorize and store and retrieve data really well, but they don't yet do a very good job of really understanding it.

Seth