Whit Andrews

Nice tight briefing from Linguamatics, a vendor I hadn’t run into in semantic analysis of information using a linguistic approach. It’s English-only, and at this point life sciences-only, which meets the four-way test I use of “are you in a vertical, a horizontal, a point solution or a platform mode?” The answer is, for Linguamatics, that they’re in a vertical, and that’s good news for their business.

On the other hand, there’s too much chrome in the interface I saw, and too much emphasis on query design and construction at the end-user level. Maybe they’re research librarians at big pharma companies doing the queries now, but the Google generation comes to us all eventually — even Big Science. I’d want to see more emphasis on conversational search results, I think. The box-and-the-button to start is what we all live with now, and there’s no getting around it.

We’ll hear more from Linguamatics, I’m sure — as well as their competition, like Cognition, Nervana, and Autonomy. I love this job.