LexisNexis Jumps on Semantic Bandwagon
October 15, 2009
Pure Discovery, a Dallas based search and content processing company, has landed a mid-sized tuna, LexisNexis. Owned by publishing giant Reed Elsevier, LexisNexis faces some strong downstream water. The $1 billion plus operation is paddling its dugout canoe upstream. Government agencies, outfits like Gov Resources, and the Google are offering products and services that address the squeals from law firms. What is the cause of the legal eagle squeaks? The cost of running searches on the commercial online services like LexisNexis and Westlaw, among others like Questel. Clients are putting caps on some law firm expenditures. Even white shoe outfits in New York and Chicago are feeling the pinch.
I saw one short news item about this tie up in an article in Search Engine Watch.
Patent searching is a particularly exciting field of investigation. If you click over to the responsive USPTO, you can search patents for free. Tip: Print out the search hints before you begin. I am not sure who is responsible for this wonderful search system, but it is a wonder.
Semantic technology along with other sophisticated content processing tools can make life a little – notice the word “little” – easier for those conducting patent research. Even the patent examiners have to use third party systems because the corpus of the USPTO is a bit like a buggy without a horse in my opinion.
The company that LexisNexis tapped to provide its semantic technology is Pure Discovery in Dallas, Texas. I had one reference to the firm in my Overflight service and that was to an individual named Adam Keys, Twitter name therealadam. Mr. Keys left Pure Discovery in 2006 after two years at the company. I had a handwritten note to the effect that venture funding was provided in part by Zon Capital Partners in Princeton, New Jersey. I have little detail about how the Pure Discovery system works.
Here’s a description of the company I pulled from Zon’s Web site:
Pure Discovery (Dallas, TX) has developed enterprise semantic web software. Its offering combines automated semantic discovery with a peer networking architecture to transform static networks into dynamic ecosystems for knowledge discovery.
I snagged a few items from the firm’s Web site.
The product line up consists of KnowledgeGraph products. These include the PD BrainLibrary (“BrainLibrary is a breakthrough technology that harnesses the collective intelligence of organizations and their people in ways that have never been possible before), PD Transparent Concept Search (“PD Concept Search has completely removed the top off the black box and for the first time ever, users are not only able to see what has been learned by the system, but also use our QueryCloud application to control it.”), PD QueryCloud Visual Query Generator (“QueryCloud then lets users control what terms or phrases are used, not used, emphasized or de-emphasized. All with the simple click of a button.”), PD Clustering (“D Clustering dynamically orders similar documents into clusters enabling users to browse data by semantically related groups rather than looking at each individual document. PD Clustering is fast enough to cluster even the largest of document populations with a benchmark of over 80 million pages clustered in a 48 hr period on a single machine.”), and PD Near-Dupe Identification (“PureDiscovery’s Near-Dedupe Identification Engine provides instant value to any application by detecting and grouping near duplicate documents. Identifying documents with these slight variances results in dramatic savings in time wasted looking at the same document again and again.”) This information is from the Pure Discovery Web site here.
The company also offers its Transparent Concept Search Query Cloud.
The software is available for specific vertical markets and niches; for example, litigation support, “human capital management” (maybe human resources or knowledge management?), intellectual property, and homeland security and defense.
These are sophisticated functions. I look forward to examining the LexisNexis patent documents using this new tool. Perhaps LexisNexis has found a software bullet to kill the beasties chewing into its core business. If not, LexisNexis will face that rushing torrent without a paddle.
As more information flows to me, I will update this write up.
Stephen Arnold, October 15, 2009
I wrote this short post without so much as a thank you from anyone.
Comments
2 Responses to “LexisNexis Jumps on Semantic Bandwagon”
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Nicely done Stephen. The experience of working with Pete Vanderheyden and his team at LexisNexis in transforming the USPTO index into a collective intelligence has been a fascinating experience. What we have in store for V2 is equally exciting and should shake things up a bit ;).
Dave Copps
CEO/PureDiscovery
Thanks for the exposure, Stephen. This is our first step onto the Semantic path and as Dave mentioned, has been a good one for our team. PureDiscovery and LexisNexis really worked hand in hand to produce this first release. I think professional searches will quickly perceive the value of the product as they “interact” with it, get familiar with how it behaves, and thereby become more skilled at getting the most from it. It’s not a miracle drug, but it is a great tool. As I said, a first step, but a big one and I think, a valuable one.
Pete Vanderheyden
LexisNexis