Unilever extends collaboration with Transinsight in biomedical semantic
searching

15 February 2008

Unilever, one of the world’s largest consumer products companies, will continue working with German search technology company Transinsight in developing a semantic search solution to integrate internet and intranet searching.

The companies will develop a tailored solutions from GoPubMed that meets Unilever Research’s diverse requirements for extracting relevant information from the huge amount of scientific data available on the internet and its intranet.

“GoPubMed is a fantastic semantic search engine that fits the needs of most users' searching of biomedical literature from the Medline database. But we believe that the system can lead to a lot more insight and time saving if users get the chance to customise the underlying knowledgebase so that the system can be used to search the Internet as well as our in-house data,” says Wendy Filsell, a senior informatician in the Unilever Information Group.

“For two years GoPubMed has been in use at Unilever with great success in the fields of nutrition and metabolism, among others. We believe continuing to walk the road paved with semantic technologies from Transinsight will bring us better insights much faster."

Transinsight’s search technology is made for the next generation of semantic searching. Its power lies in its ability to intelligently match huge amounts of textual material to very big classification networks like the Gene Ontology, MeSH or customer-tailored ontologies according to company needs.

“Where traditional techniques take months we need only a few days,” says Dr Liliana Barrio-Alvers, CTO of Transinsight. “We are proud to have developed a technology that is unparalleled worldwide when it comes to meaningful semantic searches. Transinsight’s core algorithms allow our customers to speed up their tedious daily work significantly because the search results are sorted in a smart way."

The free search platform www.GoPubMed.org will benefit from the collaboration between Unilever and Transinsight since both parties have agreed to include many of the jointly developed features in the open search platform.

“We know that GoPubMed helps the biomedical community when it comes to getting answers for more and more complex questions. The Wikipedia-like collaboration applied to the knowledge-network makes the search more intelligent every day since the users improve it for the benefit of themselves and others,” says Dr Michael R Alvers, CEO of Transinsight.

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