PointCross

What is Orienteering?

If you’re a Boy or Girl Scout, orienteering is an activity that involves a map, compass and wilderness terrain through which you navigate from specific point to point, hopefully getting as muddy as possible along the way.

If you’re a scientist working for a pharmaceutical company or a geophysicist working in an Oil & Gas exploration company, orienteering can mean much the same except that the wilderness is the unchartered landscape of not-yet-discovered knowledge and insights.  It can be the key to making important new discoveries and connections that you might never have otherwise known existed.

In the lingo of Orchestra™, our ontology-driven platform, orienteering is a technique that allows users to chart multiple foraging pathways through institutional data, to understand the context of their search results, and to explore new and often unforeseen relationships across assets, people, applications, and geographies, breaking down these traditional silos.  We call this area of search ‘orienteering’ because it has some things in common with the Boy Scout version:  there is the same guided navigation and sense of exploration and discovery. The metaphorical mud, if you will, is the metadata picked up in the contexts of the waypoints.

Of course, finding the destination is only part of the objective.  The path to reach the desired destination is part of the essence of orienteering – both the sport and the search technique.  Defining the best path to an insight or discovering interesting side paths (roads less traveled, as Robert Frost would say) is just as much the objective.  These paths defined by individual scientists and explorationists can eventually form well-traveled trails that can be retraced and eventually become codified knowledge on which institutional decisions can be made.

This exploration is the key to scientists, geophysicists, and business users connecting patterns across disparate, disconnected areas of knowledge, seeing new patterns that were previously hidden, and interacting with their peers for collaborative discovery.  For a scientist, these discoveries can lead to innovation and the next successful drug – or the early realization that a substance in the pipeline is likely to fail, thus reducing costly late-stage attrition.  For geophysicists, these discoveries can yield better exploration decisions.  And for corporate leadership, these discoveries can lead to better strategic decisions.

The term ‘orienteering’ was first used in 1886 and it meant “the crossing of unknown land with the aid of a map and a compass.”  In many ways, “unknown land” is a good description for the vast, untapped knowledge stores of the typical large corporation.  They’re both big, full of immensely rich resources, and impossible to traverse without the right tools and guided navigation.  In fact, if we were to pursue this analogy accurately, not only does Orchestra™ offer the map and compass, but it also offers the boat, bike and snowshoes to actually get across the diverse and siloed institutional knowledge landscape.  For pharmaceutical and E&P companies both, orienteering can offer the “guidance” they’ve been seeking to a better pipeline.

To learn more about orienteering for pharmaceutical companies, read our Search & Orienteering brief.

Learn more about Orchestra™ here, or read about why an ontology engine drives Orchestra™ in this white paper by Dr. Suresh Madhaven, CEO of PointCross.