Life Sciences

Last Updated (Tuesday, 18 November 2008 18:09)

1. Life Sciences

Due to the large emphasis on research within Life and Health Sciences organisations, they realise the benefit a search tool such as SOPHIA can bring. For example, researchers requirements range from needing to find one specific paper to use as a reference, to finding almost all texts on a particular subject. In the former case it is often difficult to remember the precise terms used in the paper in order to find it. With conventional approaches unless you know and use the precise terms used by the authors of the paper, it would not be retrieved. In the latter case it is almost impossible to retrieve all documents on a specific topic using conventional Boolean approaches. Synonyms, for example, pose a real challenge. Without adopting a taxonomy (which is extremely time consuming and very expensive) this issue cannot be resolved.

SOPHIA overcomes these problems for researchers and scientists. SOPHIA doesn't simply search by basic keywords, but by the meaning of what you are looking for. Additionally SOPHIA discovers and understands the implicit semantic links among documents enabling documents that don't specifically contain your query terms to be identified and returned as an integral part of your search results. Therefore rather than reading a text in isolation you can read it plus all the other texts in the same semantic space as it. This increases understandability and learning.

Another advantage of SOPHIA over conventional search is that conventional techniques can only be useful when you know specific documents exist and what terms to use to retrieve them. That is they are useful for the recovery of known information. Often researchers are unaware of a texts existence so cannot possibly know what terms to use to recover it. What they need is a discovery tool that educates them as to the existence of texts they didn't know about or how to search for. This is the strength of SOPHIA.

Finally, time is often wasted during search reading documents that are irrelevant to what you are looking for. This is extremely frustrating. SOPHIA overcomes this problem by automatically and clearly explaining the relevancy of each returned document and how it relates to your query. This means you know what aspect of your query term(s) each document is about, before you invest your precious time reading it. This saves an enormous amount of time and reduces frustration.