The Weather Channel®

twc logo Only at The Weather Channel – 15 Words for Rain

The people at The Weather Channel® (TWC) have a word for rain, in fact they have more than a dozen words for rain: drizzle, mist, sprinkle, etc. They’re in the weather business so that’s a good thing.

It’s not a good thing to have a lot of different terms for the same thing when you’re trying to find everything having to do with a weather situation like storm preparation or clean up. And it’s especially not a good thing when your job consists of logging, storing, and retrieving video and still photos about weather.

With a library that includes nearly 18,000 media assets that total hundreds of hours of weather-related video, a consistent, dependable way to log and describe those assets is vital.  Particularly when there are more than a dozen terms used to describe just one type of precipitation—rain! 

In the past, a video producer putting together a video about storm damage could ask for a clip of an 18-wheeler overturned by a tornado. Because clips of the "18-wheeler" had been logged in as a “semi” or “tractor trailer,” the TWC staff had to perform multiple searches to find exactly the one the producer requested.
 
Too much search time to find the requested videos was inefficient, and hiring more staff was not an option. Instead, TWC staff decided to purchase Data Harmony’s Machine Aided Indexer (M.A.I.) to solve their logging/finding of video problem—the hardest part of their jobs.

M.A.I.™  Changes "Search" to "Found" at The Weather Channel

Now, using MAI, a TWC employee logs in a clip with an overall title such as "Greensburg Kansas Tornado” and a subtitle of "clean up" or "aftermath."
But it’s the synopsis field that really separates the clip from all the other tornado clean up clips.  A description of what the TWC staffer sees on the video is entered in natural language: “large pile of debris,” “close up of chainsaw,” “cutting fallen branches,” etc.

Then the user clicks the MAI Lookup button and is shown a list of suggested keywords that were selected using rules like "near," or “with." So if “chainsaw” appears near “fallen branches,”  MAI will return “storm cleanup” in the list of keywords.  As for the 18-wheeler problem, now when that term is entered at TWC, the 18-wheeler is either accepted or the user is redirected to use “semi” or “tractor trailer” or “big truck”—whatever has been agreed upon as the preferred usage. 

“We used to have to enter data into the keywords field manually, after writing the synopsis. Now, we simply click the MAI Lookup button, and the keywords field instantly auto-populates with the keywords generated by MAI,”explained Jay Tellock, Librarian at The Weather Channel.

The keywords come from a list of preferred synonyms with all the aliases and variations combined into a single rule. All the variations of the term are captured, which not only makes it easy to input into the system but also easy to retrieve by the searcher.  No matter what term the searcher uses for his or her question, the system will return all the relevant results.

Jay added, “Saving time has clearly been the biggest benefit.  Searching for "storm preps" instead of "boarding up," "sandbagging," "hurricane shutters," "evacuation kits,"—the list goes on, probably cuts search time by as much as 50%, depending upon other unique search criteria for a specific request.”

Since implementing MAI, the search takes only a few minutes and the results are exactly what was asked for. Findability is increased, saving staff time and minimizing frustration.

Joyce Jefferson, Manager Library Services at The Weather Channel is very pleased with the performance of Data Harmony’s Machine Aided Indexer:
“Prior to MAI, we did not have a well-controlled vocabulary; the indexing was loose and unreliable. In the absence of an automated index of terms, each of our 4 librarians would use his or her own selected terms to describe scenes. Because of the existence of multiple terms describing similar scenes, our old search process required several steps."

“In order to identify all possible information that would satisfy a request, an average of seven searches was conducted for each search request. MAI has improved the accuracy of information retrieval and eliminated duplicated efforts, thus improving productivity by processing more material in the same amount of time,” she added.