20 000 unique users are visiting each day a free knowledge-based search engine named GoPubMed, on which biomedical texts and details of experts of the biomedical field can be found.
The chief executive officer and co-founder of the company that supports the search engine, Mr. Michael R. Alvers, stated that the well-known search engines are encountering several difficulties in providing users with the exact information they need. For instance, according to Mr. Alvers, if users type in a search engine the words 'IT investment' and 'Germany', they will come up with a plethora of articles that might not be relevant, since a standard search engine cannot find a specific article on a new investment in Dresden; this is due to the limited ability of a regular engine to 'understand' that Dresden is located in Germany.
In this regard, the 'Semantic Grid Browser for the Life Sciences Applied to the Study of Infectious Diseases' (Sealife) - a Dresden-based project funded by the European Commission's (EC) Sixth Research Framework Programme - aims to help search engines understand what they are actually looking for. This is a great benefit for companies and researchers, since it will help them organise their vast knowledge resources. Building on results of the Sealife project, an intelligent, 'semantic' browser that is now being marketed to companies has been developed. There are, however, certain applications freely available on the internet.
The free public website GoPubMed is based on the standard database PubMed, provided by the US National Library of Medicine. PubMed is widely used among biomedical researchers. "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 Mr. Alvers calls 'ontologies'. An ontology is a kind of a dictionary or a vocabulary. GoPubMed uses the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), an international medical vocabulary, and the Gene Ontology (GO) to better understand and identify 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 down the choice of articles via a tree-like user interface, based on the same ontologies used to expand the query. Mr. Alvers added that "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 combination of an extended database query with an intuitive interface also convinced the jury of the Red Dot communication design award, with the GoPubMed beating more than 6 000 competitors in the 2009 award.
"In an age of ever growing online resources, there is undoubtedly a need for semantic browsing," states the project officer for the Sealife project from the European Commission, Mr. Joel Bacquet. "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."
