Another sci-tech search engine has joined others to serve the needs and tastes of scientists. This one comes from a small company whose main service is the Lalisio social network for scientists. While the 2 million-plus article content nowhere near reaches the size and scope of behemoths such as Elsevier’s Scirus or Google Scholar, the Q-Sensei search engine (http://literature.lalisio.com/oai.html) has a metadata orientation that offers some interesting search capabilities. It can suggest alternative search strategies and allows searchers to narrow and focus their search results in a manner familiar to traditional searchers. At this point, it only searches open access content from ArXiv and PubMed Central, but parallel services also reach IngentaConnect and a series of book citation sources.

The arXiv database focuses on papers in physics, mathematics, nonlinear science, computer science, quantitative biology, and statistics. PubMed Central, from the National Library of Medicine, archives biomedical and life science journals. Under recent regulations, NIH-funded research must emerge—in time—into open access on PubMed Central. The National Institutes of Health are among the largest funders of medical research worldwide. In handling PubMed Central content, Lalisio uses MeSH thesaurus headings.

In addition to suggesting search strategies and terms, Q-Sensei lets users search within the search suggestions. It structures searches within categories, e.g., author, keyword, publisher, language, and year of publication. Users can remove search suggestions as well as adding them to focus search results. The service analyzes search results into different metadata categories, such as author, keyword, or document type, and displays terms in these categories that appear most often.

Q-Sensei is a work in progress. According to Ute Rother, CEO of Q-Sensei and managing director of Lalisio, "This is only the beginning. We will continue to work hard on expanding our offerings of searchable literature databases and our services for scholars worldwide." One missing feature is phrase-making or proximity searching. Rother assured me that this was on their list of things to do. The Q-Sensei site prompts users to suggest improvements and provide feedback. She also confirmed that they were looking for more content to add. In a world where Elsevier’s Scirus boasts its reach to more than 55 million articles, 2 million seems quite small. Rother indicated that discussions have begun with OCLC.

In identifying the corporate structure behind the newservice, things became a little complicated. Q-Sensei Corp. is a Delaware corporation resulting from the 2007 merger of the German company, Lalisio GmbH (founded in 2001), and the U.S. company, QUASMCorp. Lalisio still operates out of Erfurt, Germany, while Q-Sensei is temporarily headquartered in Melbourne, Fla., though its website (www.q-sensei.com) states its location as Baltimore. Rother was in the U.S. when I spoke to her, working on new funding sources, shoring up organization of the Q-Sensei Corp., and looking for new content for the search engine.

At present, the Lalisio social network of scientists seems to be the most active side of the operation (www.lalisio.com). The service is free upon registration. In fact, the Q-Sensei Corp. website does not link to the Q-Sensei search engine. Within that network, the "Lalisio Literature" feature duplicates Q-Sensei and adds to its content. With the added content, it totals some 6 million records. The book content comes from AbeBooks, Alibris, Amazon, eCampus, and Powell’s. Published periodical articles come from IngentaConnect. The Lalisio Knowledge Network contains personal knowledge profiles, resumes, and bibliographies, as well as shared publications. Groups are created around key topics, some available to all Lalisio members, some restricted. Future plans may also include offering Q-Sensei to other companies for partnering or internal use, according to Rother. At present, the book search engine operation has links to online book sale sites.

According to its FAQ, the name "lalisio" is Latin for "little donkey." As the FAQ describes the selection of the name, "The term from the ancient language of scholars stresses our connection with academia. The image of the little donkey appealed to us since our network, similar to an intelligent and reliable donkey, can help you with transporting and delivering knowledge in a convenient and efficient manner." Memories from my high school Latin classes provoked a further investigation. The Romans and other Latin-speakers usually use "asinus" for donkey or "asellus" for a small or young donkey. However—and thanks once again to Google BookSearch—Martial devotes one of his epigrams (Book 13) to this description, "While the wild ass is young, and fed by its mother alone, the nursling has, but only for a short time, the name of lalisio." Actually, the term entered Latin via a local North African term, as described by Pliny the Elder. Apparently, this particular suckling stage of life earned a separate nomenclature due to culinary interest in the beast. Think "veal."

At Enterprise Search Summit (Sept. 23-24, San Jose, CA), expert speakers tackle tough topics such as tuning search to deliver optimum results, making the most of search logs and analytics, applying web services solutions to metadata challenges, developing topic maps, and much more. Two all-day concurrent tracks of conference programming pack more hours of programming into the concentrated conference schedule and give you the chance to select topics of special interest to customize your conference experience.

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Register to attend ESS West by visiting our secure registration page. We offer several different pass options that you can customize to make your conference experience as complete as possible. We have added a free expo pass so visitors can meet with all of the enterprise search vendors in a personal setting. Many companies demo products, and there will also be free demonstrations and classes held on the expo floor!

Listof Exhibiting Companies (combined with the KMWorld & Intranets ExpoHall)

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iCONECT Development, LLC, provider of litigation support and collaboration software, and Content Analyst Company, LLC, provider of conceptual search and advanced text analytics software, announced an integration that identifies related documents and groups them into folders in iCONECT software. Content Analyst Analytical Technology (C.A.A.T.) works by analyzing entire documents – based on concepts versus keyword or search terms – so it will identify appropriate categories and appropriate documents even if key terms aren’t present in those documents. Once processed by C.A.A.T., folders are created in iCONECT’s flagship products iCONECTnXT and iCONECTeXT for each category containing related documents. Categories can also be nested.

(www.contentanalyst.com, www.iconect.com)  

Publicis Groupe and Google announced that Publicis Groupe has agreed to acquire the Performics search marketing business (Performics) from Google. Chicago-based Performics, a search marketing services providers, helps to improve the performance of advertisers’ investments and maximize client campaign effectiveness. The acquisition of Performics will enhance Publicis Groupe’s search capabilities and strengthen the offering of the VivaKi Nerve Center, a new strategic entity launched by the Groupe last June. The addition of Performics will deliver a full suite of performance marketing tools and capabilities to Publicis Groupe agencies and their clients.

(www.google.com, www.publicisgroupe.com/site)

IBM introduced new Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software designed to help clients meet legal discovery requirements. The new IBM eDiscovery solutions extend IBM’s ECM software platform to enable organizations to take control of electronically stored information across an enterprise. IBM’s eDiscovery software helps companies manage the eDiscovery process by enabling them to automate the process of collecting, searching, and classifying information across multiple content sources, while maintaining security and the ability to track changes. IBM eDiscovery software also integrates with IBM’s business process management (BPM) capabilities.  

(www.ibm.com)

Google Inc. announced a new version of the Google Search Appliance integrated hardware and software solution, with a new architecture that can index all of an organization's content, up to 10 million documents, in a single box. In addition to capacity and performance improvements, the new Google Search Appliance offers improved search quality, enhanced personalization, security, and language support. Features include the ability to search across all enterprise content, personalization, advanced biasing, alerts, and advanced reporting.

(www.google.com)  

The ExtraLabs Software company, a developer of software for creating RSS feeds, announced the new release of the Easy RSS Content Generator. Easy RSS Content Generator has a built-in FTP client, an automatic word replacement dictionary that will allow users to increase the uniqueness of the created pages, and a built-in tool for prompting keywords. Easy RSS Content Generator can be used to search for RSS feeds and add them. Easy RSS Content Generator is compatible with all operating systems of the Windows family (95, 98, Me, 2000, XP, NT, Vista) and supports all RSS, RDF,
and Atom formats.

(www.extralabs.net)

SearchInform Technologies Inc., which specializes in information retrieval, data search storing, and processing technologies, announced the launch of SearchInform version 4.4.1. Main features of SearchInform 4.4.1 include a phrase search with due consideration to stemming and thesaurus, new SoftInform Search Technology of search for similar documents, high indexing speed, index size of 15-25% from the actual size of the text data, query caching system, support of over 60 text formats, correct work with archives, and universal data sources.

(www.searchinform.com)

StoredIQ, Inc., provider of enterprise-class information management technology, announced enhanced support for the EMC Documentum platform. StoredIQ’s appliance now offers the ability to locate and insert unstructured information as records into the most current version of EMC Documentum and place those records under litigation hold leveraging Documentum’s Retention Policy Services. StoredIQ provides classification, business policy, and action framework to execute litigation hold, storage optimization, and document retention and destruction policies. With StoredIQ, companies can index, search, tag, move, or copy content to and from Documentum servers. StoredIQ can discover electronically stored information (ESI) located on file shares, Microsoft SharePoint, and desktops/laptops, classify and deduplicate unmanaged ESI, and automatically insert those items as new records into Documentum.

(www.storediq.com)

The Army's Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS,) has deployed MarkLogic Server from Mark Logic to support knowledge management and information sharing efforts. The BCKS' solution is called the Warrior Knowledge Base (WKB).

With its technology, Mark Logic reports in a recent press release, soldiers can rapidly discover, access and use content. They can build virtual documents, pulling together the most relevant information from many search results such as lessons learned, reports and articles written by soldiers, civilians and contractors. The technology helps the experienced soldier share information with the less experienced, according to Mark Logic. Further, it reports, rapid knowledge transfer enables warfighters to respond to changing conditions and apply new tactics faster than the enemy.

"Connecting our 90,000-plus members with relevant documents in the WKB repository within seconds, and then sharing that content with other forum members, is our goal," says Mark Uhart, WKB integrator and knowledge management consultant. "The WKB shows promising capabilities that have already demonstrated great utility."

Uhart continues, "For example, doctrinal content in Army field manuals published in English-Arabic (used in Iraq) or English-Pushto (used in Afghanistan) can be difficult to discover, access and understand using a traditional database approach. The file sizes are also very large, which could make finding relevant content a time-consuming task on a low-bandwidth network. The metadata assigned to these types of documents, and the fact that content can be discovered and viewed page-by-page without having to download the file, allows discovery and use of only the relevant content. BCKS has the capability to store and manage content in 37 different languages."

The Army's Battle Command Knowledge System is a major subordinate organization of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

StoredIQ reports enhanced support for EMC Documentum. StoredIQ’s appliance now offers the ability to locate and insert unstructured information as records into the most current version of EMC Documentum and place those records under litigation hold leveraging Documentum’s Retention Policy Services.

As part of an overall information life cycle management strategy, StoredIQ provides a holistic classification, business policy and action framework to execute litigation hold, storage optimization and document retention and destruction policies. StoredIQ provides support for EMC’s Centera and Celerra storage platforms in addition to Documentum.

With StoredIQ, the company says, customers can index, search, tag, move or copy content to and from Documentum servers. From a records management perspective, StoredIQ can discover electronically stored information (ESI) located on file shares, Microsoft SharePoint and desktops/laptops; classify and de-duplicate unmanaged ESI; and automatically insert those items as new records into Documentum. StoredIQ can automatically and seamlessly place those records under litigation hold using Documentum’s advanced hold functionality. When collecting and inserting ESI with Documentum, StoredIQ can preserve a variety of Documentum attributes including object name, object ID, version, title, author, keywords, dates, size, etc.

Yahoo! Inc. announced that it will offer users the ability to opt-out of customized advertising on Yahoo.com. This new option expands Yahoo!'s existing opt-out program for customized advertising served by Yahoo! on third party networks. Yahoo! announced the new opt-out capability as part of its response to a Congressional inquiry about customization sent to 33 companies from the House Energy and Commerce Committee. This new opt-out capability is expected to be available for consumers by the end of August. Users will be able to access the opt-out in the Yahoo! privacy center, which is linked on the home page and nearly every page on the Yahoo! network.

(www.yahoo.com)

askSam Systems announced the release of version 7 of askSam, its free-form database software. askSam lets users organize, search, and analyze both structured and unstructured information. askSam can create searchable databases from different types of data, including email, word processing documents, web pages, PDF files, spreadsheets, and other databases. The Dynamic Folder View lets users place information in folders and sub-folders based on field content. askSam 7 also allows users to drag and drop attachments, such as images or other documents, directly into an askSam database. askSam now connects with all web search engines like Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Windows Live, and more.

(www.askSam.com)

Yahoo! Inc., the global internet company, announced the general availability of Fire Eagle, an open platform that helps users take their location to the web while giving them the ability to control how and where their location data is shared. Fire Eagle offers developers protocols for updating or accessing that information. Any networked service can use Fire Eagle to respond to a user's. Services include Brightkite, a location based social network, Dash, a two-way, internet-connected GPS navigation system, and Outside.in's Radar, which provides personalized local news.

(www.yahoo.com)  

Datawatch Corporation, provider of Enterprise Information Management (EIM), announced the release of Monarch BI Server, a web-based Business Intelligence (BI) solution built to address the needs of small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) and department-level users. Monarch BI Server stores and transforms existing reports and other business documents into browser-based or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet tables, summaries, and charts. Monarch BI Server leverages system output from any existing application such as ERP, CRM, or accounting. An optional Monarch BI Server module allows for the storage, mining, and delivery of PDFs. Monarch BI Server is also suited for defined vertical functions within an organization such as auditing, claims management, supply chain management, and more.

(www.datawatch.com)

Abcam, a bioscience company specializing in the supply of antibodies from a web-based catalogue, and Transinsight, a specialist in semantic search technologies, announced collaboration in the field of protein information quality control using bioinformatics workflows. The decision to work with Transinsight was made because it operates the semantic search engine GoPubMed.org and has bioinformatics and protein databases. 

(www.transinsight.com, www.abcam.com)