BigKnowledge: Not Just a Metaphor
André Skupin of BigKnowledge, one of our 2023 Concept Grant recipients, gives us an update
Of Landscapes and Maps
Who hasn’t heard common refrains to “keep track of the business|innovation|threat landscape” or “put your product on the map”? It appears then that geography and cartography are a source of rich metaphors. However, have you ever seen these landscapes? And do maps of products or innovation in any meaningful manner look or function like the real-world artifact after which they are presumably fashioned? An artifact whose history goes back millennia, and whose modern incarnation in the form of GIS has become a fulcrum of enterprise computing for many governments and businesses. Think about all that depends on the ability to place anyone and anything in geographic space, from transportation to public health, environmental protection, and national defense. Meanwhile, hundreds of years of cartographic innovation yielded solid principles for how data can be turned into symbols, leading the way for what we now call data visualization. With that in mind, some have long argued that geography and cartography can yield not only metaphors but also methods for shaping a wide range of non-georeferenced data into a visual, map-like form. BigKnowledge is turning that vision into reality with the BoKMap platform for exploration, discovery, and insight in document spaces.
GPS for Knowledge
Foundational to BoKMap is a deep translation of the fundamentals of mapping technologies into the domain of unstructured text data. Think of our patented workflow and platform as a GPS for the knowledge held in text. This is relying on three fundamental advances:
(1) We create knowledge reference systems – think of these as the equivalent of the latitude/longitude coordinate system, albeit for high-dimensional topic space – through neural network models trained with domain-specific documents. These models are then turned into domain base maps, visually taking the form of landscape maps, with mountains, valleys, and rich labeling. To experience this, see our BoKMap Explorer apps for Data Science & Analytics, Management Consulting & Accounting, Geospatial Technology, and Chemistry.
(2) Any text can be projected into the knowledge space and overlaid on the base map, similar to what GPS provides in geographic space. This is already helpful when exploring our base maps with simple queries. However, it also allows us to project an arbitrary number of documents into the same space, providing domain-specific context for each. In this manner we have already integrated several million documents into our system, from research publications to patents.
(3) In addition to traditional text-based queries for documents – where the query itself takes the form of text – the BoKMap platform provides a novel map-based query mechanism, which users can access through the BoKMap Analyst app or API services. With this, there is no need to type text or even know the specialized language of the domain. Instead, in basic query mode you simply double-click in the map to issue queries and you can even formulate simple Boolean queries by adding more query locations (“AND”) or specifying regions to be excluded (“NOT”). Click here for an example querying the intersection of “collective intelligence & social capital” with “artificial & human intelligence” in the Data Science & Analytics space. In expert query mode, this expands to drawn queries – as points, lines or areas – and more Boolean operators. Click here for two simultaneous transects, one through “information security,” the other reaching from “financial institutions” to “monetary policy,” for a complex query boiling a large corpus of business research articles down to a few dozen, without the need for keywords or taxonomic categories. With richly labeled, multi-scale base maps, where zoom-in reveals finer topical structures, users can query documents while serendipitously discovering the language and structure of a knowledge domain.
Next: Putting Social Science Software Tools on the Map
Current deployments of the BoKMap platform give users access to more than two million artifacts, including research papers, patents, Wikipedia articles, and coverage of 25,000+ influential people from industry and academia. Recently, thanks to a Sage Concept Grant, we have been working on an integration of data about software tools, starting with a set of 500+ tools collected by the Sage team a few years back. In our first iteration – already deployed in the Data Science & Analytics and Management Consulting & Accounting apps – we’ve expanded this to 1,250 tools and tool providers. In a future post, we will explain the process and how you can leverage this collection, which we expect to expand to well over 2,000 entries.
Software tools queried by double-clicking in the "higher education" region of the Data Science & Analytics map (Click here for live access)