Iain Downs - Commercial Software Consultants

Making great commercial software

Knowledge from Text

Since developing automatic categorisation systems for M.A.I.D. Plc in the 90's my colleagues and I have had a strong interest in how computers can (in various ways) 'understand' text and we've developed our own tools and technologies for gleaning sense from masses of words.

And over the last 4 or 5 years we've seen this area turn from one which was really only of interest to academic research to one which is being applied in real-world commercial products.

Our interests and developments have covered a wide range of applications which include:-

  • Finding themes in large bodies of text and how they relate to each other and group
  • Finding linguistic patterns in very large collections of text
  • Web scale retrieval of data (across 100,000 ++ sites)
  • Search and result processing
  • Extraction of lists (e.g. companies with particular interests) through web scale search and processing

Contact us for more information or to discuss your needs