Stephen Scarr
CEO and Co-Founder, eContext
Throughout my career “order” helped me. I found the more I could orient things into groups and sub-groups, the better I did.
When we launched our first metasearch engine in 1999, I quickly understood that the internet was the ultimate tool for order. We were working on ways to deliver better results so that our visitors would get the best experience— organizing our advertising bids more efficiently to deliver the best ads. The more we could drill down into the proper meaning of words, the better the site did.
I set out to categorize everything, hiring a staff of taxonomists and subject matter experts as well as programmers and engineers to create, ultimately, the world’s largest semantic text classification engine. We launched this product as eContext in 2011.
Taxonomy will always be the framework
Our vision has always been to use taxonomy and categorization to help machines understand humans more efficiently to make the entire experience of interacting with machines a more natural experience.
As we look at what’s next on the horizon, we’ve found that as technology takes leaps ahead through advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, our taxonomy continues to serve as a solid framework.