GoPubMed turns a dull search engine into a brainiac

20,000 unique visitors each day benefit from European Commission (EC)-funded intelligent browser project

Published: 12/18/2009 Translations are available in: FR, DE

DRESDEN, GERMANY - (HealthTech Wire / News) - Standard internet search engines do little more than trawl documents for key words and by and large there is no intelligence involved. A Dresden-based spin-off of the EU-funded Sealife project is helping search engines understand what they are actually looking for, which is a huge benefit to companies and researchers in terms of helping them to organize their vast knowledge resources.

“If you google ‘IT investment’ and ‘Germany’, you will find a wealth of articles. But what you won’t find is a specific article on a new investment in Dresden because Google does not know that Dresden is located in Germany,” says Michael R. Alvers, CEO and co-founder of Transinsight. Building on results of the “Sealife” project funded under the umbrella of the EU’s 6th Research Framework Program, the company has developed an intelligent, “semantic” browser that is now being marketed to companies and which is also freely available on the internet for certain applications.

The free public web site GoPubMed, a semantic browser for the life sciences community, demonstrates what a semantic browser is all about. It is based on the standard database PubMed, provided by the US National Library of Medicine. PubMed is widely used among biomedical researchers. But it is far from perfect: “PubMed returns some 50,000 articles if you enter ‘heart diseases’. In reality, though, there are more than 800,000 articles on this topic. Most of them do not use ‘heart diseases’ as a key word, so the standard PubMed search engine won’t find them,” Alvers explains.

What GoPubMed does to considerably expand the query is to add what Alvers calls “ontologies”. An ontology is a kind of dictionary or a vocabulary. GoPubMed uses the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), an international medical vocabulary, and the  gene ontology (GO) to better “understand” which basic research articles are related, for example, to heart disease.

But having to choose from more than 800,000 articles instead of only 50,000 is not necessarily a big leap forward for the user. This is why GoPubMed goes a step further by narrowing the choice of articles via a tree-like user interface based on the same ontologies used to expand the query. Alvers: “After few clicks, the user arrives at a choice of articles that is both far more comprehensive and far more precise than what would be offered by a standard PubMed search.”

The life sciences community is realizing just how useful GoPubMed can be, says Alvers: “The number of users has increased rapidly during the last couple of months. We now have around 20,000 unique visitors a day.” The combination of an extended database query with an intuitive interface also convinced the jury of the prestigious red dot communication design award: GoPubMed beat more than 6,000 competitors to this year’s award.

“In an age of ever growing online resources, there is undoubtedly a need for semantic browsing,” says Joel Bacquet, project officer for the Sealife project from the European Commission. “The SeaLife project convinced us because it combined an elaborate technical approach to a common problem in many industries and research branches, the problem of information overload, with a comprehensible business plan.”

Transinsight, founded in 2006, has been in the black for two years and today the company has 10 employees and customers all over the world, among them well-known multi-nationals such as RWE and Unilever.

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Source: HealthTech Wire for GoPubMed