Business Problem

One of the key elements of scientific research is the availability of up-to-date information on the topic of research in an organized manner obtained from all the available sources in the world. Research institutions and universities subscribe to scholastic journals from different publishers to assist the researchers, students and faculties in their literature survey. The publishers provide online access for searching their database. The researchers, faculty members and students have to visit each one of these sources to search for the relevant papers by issuing queries. As a consequence, they have to spend quite a lot of time at each source for the information they are looking for. In addition, there is no organized standard format for the display of information from each source. Now the problem is clear: Searching every site and non-uniformity of information display which lead to loss of productivity and time.

Solution

NLP Labs has a product that solves this business problem. Sixth Sense Journal Search© is a federated search engine wherein users can select or choose the sources from where they want the information to be fetched and type-in the query. Our engine will hit all the selected sources. The results returned from each of the sources are aggregated re-ranked and presented to the user in a unified interface within a page. This approach will certainly improve the productivity of the user by several folds and the information is also made available quickly in a highly organized manner.

Key Features

• Easy Access. Enables users to access all necessary information with a single query. Different sources from your intranet and beyond or subscription based content can be searched in one instant.

• Flexible Technology. The underlying technology is quite flexible to include new sources in future (whether it is an internet based public resource, or intranet or subscription based sources) as and when they come into existence

• Unified User Interface. The user is always presented with the information received from different sources in an easily understandable format and provides a great user experience. The user should get accustomed to viewing search results presented to the user from each data source wherein the format will not be consistent

• Merged Ranking (Relevance). Sixth Sense Journal Search© will re-rank (as per user requirement) all the results obtained from all the selected sources. This features overrides the ranking algorithm implemented in each of the data sources.

• Automatic Clustering. The search results are automatically clustered under different categories which are dynamically generated. Also, the results are automatically grouped under authors, publications, sources and Dates as well.

• Search within Search. The users can further refine the research results across different clusters by choosing their options using the check-boxes. The filtered query is also stored for future reference.

• Export of Search results. The users can export the search results into CSV, PDF, MS- Excel, XML and Open office spreadsheet formats for later use.

• Easy Administration and Configuration. The engine can be easily configured and administrated within few hours to enable it for quick usage. The user does not require deep understanding to configure the engine.

• Supported Protocol. We support HTTP/HTTPS, Z39.50, and OAI. The framework is easily customizable to support proprietary protocols. You tell what you need and we will customize it for you.

• Supported Platform. The engine is written using dynamic programming and it runs under JVM (Java Virtual Machine). Hence we support our engine to run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS platforms.

• Scalable Architecture. The engine has been built in such a way that it can scale up as the number of users increase. Also the engine can be easily configured to run in a clustered environment to take care of additional load.

Advantages

• Hosted within your own network and hence the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) lies with you and the hence the flexibility to keep it operational is with you as well.
• Easily customizable to support customer specific intranet sources to be included as part of federated search or whenever a new journal is subscribed.
• No additional software license required other than the federated engine and the hardware required to run the engine
• A cost effective, reliable and well organized solution which meets your needs
• Excellent customer support of 24/7 to ensure that the engine is operational always.

Licensing

The engine is licensed to universities, research laboratories and libraries on annual subscription and per server basis. We are also ready to undertake the maintenance of the server on which the engine is running at an extra cost which is very nominal. The maintenance option is useful for laboratories, universities who do not have technical people to support the installation. For details on the pricing, please send a mail to info@nlplabs.co.in or call +91-80-4146 8027.