A moment of discovery
by Adam Ferrari
Adam Ferrari
Here’s a fun anecdote that I just have to share. I spent Tuesday in Toronto with some of our clients, so the timing worked out nicely for me to present an info session at the University of Waterloo for students considering joining Endeca. (Very cool to see a full crowd, and my thanks to the folks at Waterloo for hosting us).
At these kinds of events I always like to share some of our vision for where we’re going next, and as I discussed in my last post, a key area where we’re expanding the technology is in analytics. Of course, a demo is worth a thousand words, so I showed our warranty analytics demo. It’s nicely representative of some of the work we’re doing with major auto makers. The demo is built on publicly available information about automotive defects that you can download from the NHTSA. It’s a very cool application (IMHO), with views that range from interactive analytic dashboards that support a range of user roles, to search and discovery screens (below) that use text analytics to expose latent concepts in the data.
I always like putting a personal spin on demos, so when I show this one I often take a path where I look at the issues reported for the kind of car I happen to drive, a Toyota RAV4. Tuesday was no different, and I was going through the demo as usual. But when I got to the screen below, one of the Endeca engineers who was also at the info session looked surprised. Turning around, expecting something silly like a problem with the projector, instead I saw the view below.
Notice the tag cloud highlighting frequently occurring concepts found in the text associated with my RAV4. “Gas pedal” is among the largest concepts. This was a true unscripted moment of information discovery. Would better data analytics of this form have given Toyota earlier insight into the recall issue that they’re experiencing? It’s nice to get a reminder like this that we’re working on problems that really matter.
on February 9, 2010 at 10:26 am
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[...] A moment of discovery – Facets (Endeca) [...]
on February 14, 2010 at 5:45 pm
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Rumor has it that Ford Motor Company has a similar revelation some time after their problems with tire blowouts and roll-overs. In a retrospective test of their new search analytics tool, they found that, if they had been watching, they could have seen the problem long before it – pardon the pun – blew up. Even simple analytics are said to have helped Ericsson discover that ‘cell phone’ queries were generating no hits – Ericsson makes mobile phones, after all. The real question is when search logs will be used to prove that a company should have been aware of a problem – from product flaws to sexual harassment lawsuits.