And finally….

The seminal paper on the double-helix structure for DNA by Crick and Watson ends up with the statement “It has not escaped our attention that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material”. A masterpiece of understatement. At the end of a research paper there is always a very helpful section that indicates where additional research could usefully be carried out.

If we are really going to bridge the gap between academic and practice could I suggest that there should also be a section headed ‘Implications for practitioners’ that the search community could then home in on as a source of potential competitive advantage. The catalyst for this suggestion was the excellent paper by Amit Kumar Jaiswal on image retrieval at TALMIRI that every vendor of a Digital Assessment Management application would be immediately interested in. A 2018 market analysis from Gartner lists out 19 vendors and indicates that the market for DAM applications in 2020 could be $5.2 billion. That should pay for a few PhD projects.

About Martin White
Martin White

Martin is an information scientist and the author of Making Search Work and Enterprise Search. He has been involved with optimising search applications since the mid-1970s and has worked on search projects in both Europe and North America. Since 2002 he has been a Visiting Professor at the Information School, University of Sheffield and is currently working on developing new approaches to search evaluation.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.