Elsevier's Illumin8 research tool helps corporate research professionals answer R&D questions

Elsevier combines ScienceDirect content with NetBase’s semantic index technology to create a Web-based 'Technology Intelligence' tool that answers sophisticated technology and market questions

New York, February 25, 2008: Elsevier, the world’s leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical (STM) information, announced today the launch of illumin8 (www.illumin8.com), the first web-based research tool that integrates natural language search technology with content from Elsevier’s full-text scientific articles, millions of scientific abstracts, patents and billions of web sources to give users actionable solutions for research initiatives. The product is Elsevier’s latest online solution that transforms its high value content into actionable knowledge, in formats that fit into the professional’s workflow.

“We have found illumin8 to be a unique and effective way to mine the Internet and premium content for solutions to technical problems and questions,” said Mary Poul, marketing manager from 3M Medical Systems, which has beta-tested illumin8. “The value for us is the unique search capability with the deep and broad content set. Further, doing the research without illumin8 would have taken weeks and I would have spent countless hours looking at data that was not relevant to my project."

To build illumin8, Elsevier has partnered with NetBase (formerly Accelovation; www.netbase.com), a leading provider of research software solutions that enable knowledge workers to mine the Internet and other online data to accelerate research. Major Fortune 500 companies in a variety of vertical industries already use NetBase technology to perform technology intelligence, tech scouting, competitive intelligence, market discovery, and more.

How illumin8 Works

illumin8 combines search and semantic indexing technologies to distill deep meaning, purpose and insight from the vast amount of Elsevier’s full-text content, scientific abstracts from 4,000 publishers, patents and billions of web pages. This research tool extracts and analyzes solutions, which are then categorized under organizations, products, technologies, approaches, and experts. Illumin8 is designed to go beyond simple keyword search, quickly finding and extracting crisp summarized answers and interrelationships that are semantically related to the context of the search query.

In addition to finding solutions from 5 billion web pages, millions of patents and Elsevier’s premium scientific content, illumin8 users will be able to easily access the full-text of Elsevier journals if they have an online subscription to the journal through ScienceDirect, the world’s largest online platform of science, technical and medical (STM) content.