Trending Posts

mint screenshot

Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure

By John Ward / March 20, 2015 / 65 Comments
This is the history of my experience trying to make money online over the past 10 years or so. This is by far the longest post I've ever personally written and it's more of an autobiography than a blog post....
pancakeswap prediction bot

I Made an Automated Pancakeswap Prediction Bot

By John Ward / October 14, 2022 / 0 Comments
A few weeks ago I got the idea to try to automatically bid on Pancakeswap's Prediction game. So I decided to try to build a Pancakeswap Prediction bot to take on the task. I did this just to learn about...
IBM Watson Avatar Logo

IBM Watson Explorer

By John Ward / April 6, 2015 / 1 Comment
I'm going to talk a little bit about IBM Watson Explorer (WEX). A few people have contacted me about what I do at my day job as a Watson Explorer Consultant. Since this is my personal site I don't usually...
what is ibm watson

What is IBM Watson

By John Ward / July 24, 2020 / 0 Comments
There is a lot of confusion about what exactly IBM Watson is? I'm going to try to clear that up a little bit in this blog post. I'll go into the history of IBM Watson and what IBM is doing...
2022

My 2022 Recap and 2023 Plans

By John Ward / January 13, 2023 / 0 Comments
I haven't been posting to my blog that often, but I wanted to recap 2022 and lay out some of my plans for 2023. Overall, 2022 was a pretty good year for me, and I made some progress on business...
watson explorer vs elastics earch

Watson Explorer vs Elasticsearch for Enterprise Search

By John Ward / May 12, 2020 / 0 Comments
Are you interested in IBM Watson Explorer vs Elasticsearch? Recently, I had to do some comparisons between IBM Watson Explorer and Elasticsearch for a project. I spent some time going through the features of both platforms and found some interesting...

One AdSense Change Dramatically Increased My Earnings…

By John Ward / March 9, 2015 / 12 Comments
... and I have no idea what it is. I used to blog actively on my tutorial site, TeamTutorials. In it's prime the site would see over 100k page views per month. Even in the prime the site barely met...

Are Products the Road to Prosperity?

By John Ward / May 13, 2015 / 1 Comment
A few weeks ago a wrote a somewhat popular post about my past experiences trying to make money online. I went through the ups and downs of working as an affiliate promoting other people's products. At the conclusion of the...

Regular Expression Converter for Watson Explorer Engine

By John Ward / August 23, 2019 / 0 Comments
Sometimes it's useful to extract data from a Watson Explorer content node using regular expressions. In this post, I'll show you how to extract data using a regular expression and create a new content node for that specific data. To...
ibm watson discovery fundamentals

IBM Watson Discovery Fundamentals Training

By John Ward / October 28, 2020 / 0 Comments
I'm excited to announce that I've released my first course on Udemy titled IBM Watson Discovery Fundamentals. This course is designed to give business and technical users a good high-level overview of the IBM Watson Discovery service. What is IBM...
IBM Watson Avatar Logo

IBM Watson Explorer

I’m going to talk a little bit about IBM Watson Explorer (WEX). A few people have contacted me about what I do at my day job as a Watson Explorer Consultant. Since this is my personal site I don’t usually focus on what I do at my 9-5. I’m going to write a few posts to explain what exactly it’s like working for the IBM Watson Group and what applications I work with.

What is IBM Watson Explorer?

IBM Watson Explorer is a data discovery tool. It allows you to explore vast amounts of enterprise data. The tool allows you to consume and index data from various data sources. Out of the box Watson Explorer ships with many popular connectors for enterprise data systems. Using its own proprietary indexing technology, Watson Explorer can leverage natural language processing to deliver relevant query results to end-users. The product can also utilize Query Routing to route queries to websites and return the results within its own interface. This data can be integrated into a single, 360-degree view, application on the front-end.

IBM Watson Explorer ships with several different modules:

  • IBM Watson Explorer Foundational Components
    • IBM Watson Explorer Engine
    • IBM Watson Explorer Results Module
    • IBM Watson Explorer Application Builder
  • IBM Watson Explorer Analytical Components
    • IBM Watson Explorer Content Analytics Admin Console
    • IBM Watson Explorer Content Analytics Miner
    • IBM Watson Explorer Content Analytics Search
    • IBM Watson Explorer Content Analytics Studio

IBM Watson Explorer Engine

The Watson Explorer Engine component is the key backend component of the foundational components. The foundational components come from IBM’s acquisition of a startup called Vivisimo based out of Pittsburgh, PA. Engine basically acts as an enterprise search engine that can be leveraged to crawl and indexed large amounts of data both structured and unstructured. The documents are stored as XML documents. During the crawling process, XSLT can be utilized to modify the data of the document before storing it to the index. Engine can be configured to be distributed among many servers to meet big data needs and scale quickly. The web based admin interface allows IT users a simple way to manage this powerful application. For enterprise search applications engine comes with its own search interface. To leverage 360 degree views engine must be combined with IBM Watson Explorer Application Builder.

ibm watson explorer engine
The Watson Explorer Engine admin interface

IBM Watson Explorer Results Module

The results module component allows non-technical business users to manage feature of the search results within Watson Explorer. Users can use the spotlight manager to configure spotlights that will show a boosted content above standard search results based on specific keywords. You can also use Results Module’s terminology manager to easily manage spelling suggesting, synonyms, and related terms.

IBM watson explorer results module
A screenshots of the IBM Watson Explorer Results Module interface

IBM Watson Explorer Application Builder

The Application Builder module is used to build 360 views of enterprise data. This applications connects to Watson Explorer Engine and displays the indexed data to the end user. One of the primary benefits of Application Builder is that you can leverage the entity model. By creating an entity for your data you can then define relationships which allows a developer to easily combine and display related data to the end user. Users can choose to follow specific entities that they are interested in. Application Builder will then provide them with the most relevant information based on what the user follows.

The technology behind Application Builder is Ruby on Rails. Specifically, App Builder uses jRuby which means that the application runs inside a JVM. So for IT purposed it can be considered as another Java application.

App Builder ships with several out of the box widgets that can be configured to display various types of data. Most deployments of Application Builder use many custom widgets. Custom widgets allow a developer to utilize Ruby (ERB), HTML, CSS and JavaScript to deliver a custom experience. This tool is very powerful and is currently being used by many enterprise customers to get the entire 360 view of their data so they can make educated business decisions.

ibm watson explorer app builder
An example of a “360 View” using IBM Watson Explorer Application Builder.

 IBM Watson Content Analytics

The content analytics module is a separate piece of software from the foundational components. IBM Watson Content Analytics allows you to collect and analyze different types of content. It stores this content in its own indices which are currently separate from Watson Explorer Engine. It can consume both structured and unstructured data from documents, email, databases, websites, and other enterprise repositories.  You can then perform text analytics across the data that is indexed by Watson Content Analytics.

What is a Watson Explorer Consultant

I’m a Watson Explorer Consultant. That means I work directly with customers to conceptualize and deliver Watson Explorer Solutions. My primary focus is on the Watson Explorer Engine foundational components. I use the engine, app builder, and results module components to deliver solutions to data problems at companies big and small. I’m currently one of the experts on my team for IBM Watson Explorer Application Builder. I’m able to utilize my past web development experience to deliver some highly customized solutions to customer data problems.

Our team is based out of Pittsburgh, PA but we are also distributed across the world. I currently work from my home in Ohio full time. I spend a portion of my time traveling to client sites to consult with them directly and deliver solutions in person. It takes a special kind of person to be able to handle problems with both technology and humans. If you’d like to reach out to me please use my contact form.

Published by

John Ward

I've been in working in the tech space since about 2004. I've spent time working with Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Advertising technology.