Elsevier's Illumin8 Research Tool Helps Corporate Research Professionals Answer R&D Questions

Main Category: IT / Internet / E-mail
Article Date: 26 Feb 2008 - 6:00 PST

email to a friend   printer friendly   view / write opinions   rate article

Elsevier, the world's leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical (STM) information, has announced the launch of illumin8 (http://www.illumin8.com/), the first web-based research tool that integrates natural language search technology with content from Elsevier's full-text scientific articles, millions of scientific abstracts, patents and billions of web sources to give users actionable solutions for research initiatives. The product is Elsevier's latest online solution that transforms its high value content into actionable knowledge, in formats that fit into the professional's workflow.

"We have found illumin8 to be a unique and effective way to mine the Internet and premium content for solutions to technical problems and questions," said Mary Poul, marketing manager from 3M Medical Systems, which has beta-tested illumin8. "The value for us is the unique search capability with the deep and broad content set. Further, doing the research without illumin8 would have taken weeks and I would have spent countless hours looking at data that was not relevant to my project."

To build illumin8, Elsevier has partnered with NetBase (formerly Accelovation; www.netbase.com), a leading provider of research software solutions that enable knowledge workers to mine the Internet and other online data to accelerate research. Major Fortune 500 companies in a variety of vertical industries already use NetBase technology to perform technology intelligence, tech scouting, competitive intelligence, market discovery, and more.

How illumin8 Works

illumin8 combines search and semantic indexing technologies to distill deep meaning, purpose and insight from the vast amount of Elsevier's full-text content, scientific abstracts from 4,000 publishers, patents and billions of web pages. This research tool extracts and analyzes solutions, which are then categorized under organizations, products, technologies, approaches, and experts. Illumin8 is designed to go beyond simple keyword search, quickly finding and extracting crisp summarized answers and interrelationships that are semantically related to the context of the search query.

In addition to finding solutions from 5 billion web pages, millions of patents and Elsevier's premium scientific content, illumin8 users will be able to easily access the full-text of Elsevier journals if they have an online subscription to the journal through ScienceDirect, the world's largest online platform of science, technical and medical (STM) content.

"Research professionals now have a purpose-built productivity tool tailored to deliver solutions and insights in seconds. With illumin8, we are unlocking new value from Elsevier's world class content and other sources," said Rafael Sidi, vice president for product development of Elsevier's Engineering & Technology Division. "R&D knowledge workers no longer need to spend hours, days or weeks sifting and reading through thousands of search results or full-text documents, and then manually synthesize results to find actionable answers. illumin8 is poised to transform the way companies innovate, find solutions to their R&D problems, collaborate and make key R&D investment decisions."

Fulfilling a Research Market Need

Booz Allen estimates that the Global Innovation 1000 companies spent $447 billion on R&D initiatives in 2006, making it increasingly important for these organizations to adopt technologies that accelerate innovation cycles and enable them to identify opportunities faster, while simultaneously minimizing investment risk.

illumin8 was designed with corporate development partners to help R&D professionals find solutions to R&D problems faster and support R&D investments decisions. For further product information, please visit http://www.illumin8.com/.

----------------------------
Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release.
----------------------------

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier's 7,000 employees in over 70 offices worldwide publish more than 2,000 journals and 1,900 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, such as Science Direct. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/), MDConsult (http://www.mdconsult.com/), Scopus (http://www.info.scopus.com/), bibliographic databases, and online reference works.

Elsevier (http://www.elsevier.com/) is a global business headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has offices worldwide. Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc (http://www.reedelsevier.com/), a world-leading publisher and information provider. Operating in the science and medical, legal, education and business-to-business sectors, Reed Elsevier provides high-quality and flexible information solutions to users, with increasing emphasis on the Internet as a means of delivery. Reed Elsevier's ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

About NetBase

NetBase is a leader in business research software solutions to enable knowledge workers to mine the Internet and other online data to accelerate research for technology intelligence, tech scouting, competitive intelligence, market discovery, and more. 3M, Procter & Gamble, General Mills and Clorox are among the more than two dozen Fortune 500 companies using NetBase products. To learn more about NetBase please visit http://www.netbase.com/.

Source: Tom Reller
Elsevier