Transinsight, provider of knowledge-based software solutions, has released a new online version of the well-known life-science search engine GoPubMed. This, the first semantic search engine, reduces search time by up to 90%. By sorting search results it enables scientists to answer biomedical questions in completely new way. The latest version of the search machine sorts all relevant documents to the top level categories What, Who, Where and When. This way, for the first time in search history, it is possible to design searches on both content and metadata in a seamlessly integrated way. Dr. Michael R. Alvers, CEO of Transinsight, points out that the opportunity for a user to rank the search results according to personal needs is revolutionary. "We don't rank, the user does!" says Alvers. "With our semantic technology we put the user at the centre of the search. Ranking algorithms like Google's PageRank are not relevant for us anymore since with our search technology the user is in the driver's seat. Also the folksonomy feature to curate matches is new and makes the Web 2.0 now and here!" continues Alvers enthusiastic.
Classical search engines are successful in helping users find information based on keywords. But they are not successful in answering complex questions. Knowledge searches are needed to answer the complex questions which are so predominant in the life sciences. Knowledge, however, is hardly ever used in traditional search engines. The new version of the search engine GoPubMed is based on two knowledge networks containing more than 120,000 terms: Gene Ontology (GO) and the Medical subject headings (MeSH). This allows biologists and medical doctors to find the needle in the haystack in both the bio-molecular and the medical domains.
"In GoPubMed the search is sorted; sorting documents into highly organised networks such as GO and MeSH facilitates the finding of relevant documents and the answering of questions with significant ease!" says Michael Schroeder, Professor for Bioinformatics at TU Dresden and CSO and Co‑Founder of Transinsight. "The use of GoPubMed can result in time savings of up to 90%. Consider the search for Aspirin, for example. With other search engines one gets more than 40,000 results for this term; by using GoPubMed's subtle mechanism for refining searches these 40,000 can be reduced to the 9 relevant to, say, coronary thrombosis. Finding these 9 articles with traditional technology takes several hours and the searcher has to have enormous knowledge in the field of coronary thrombosis. With GoPubMed even untrained students find these relevant articles within 3 seconds."
This enormous potential has been experienced not only in academia but also by big enterprises like Unilever, Elsevier, Statoil and Shell. The time these companies save with Transinsight's technology can now be used to act, instead of performing tedious searches.
"It is quite impressive to see the progress in GoPubMed. The possibility to seamlessly search PubMed, the web, the local desktop and corporate intranets on base of a knowledge-base makes the Web 2.0 reality for biologists and medical doctors" says David Ruslan, provider of www.WorldPharmaNews.com.
About Transinsight
Founded in 2005, Transinsight is focused on software solutions for the life sciences providing products for knowledge-based technologies. The flagship product, www.GoPubMed.org, a well established biomedical search engine, is the first knowledge-based search engine for the Life Sciences on the Internet. Transinsight is headquartered in one of the leading German biotech incubators, the BioInnovationCenter Dresden BIOZ, where science and business work under one roof. Transinsight works in close collaboration with the Technical University Dresden.