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Search Technology Developed by DOE Wins NIH Challenge

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Search Technology Developed by DOE Wins NIH Challenge

WebLib, a start-up company which won a Department of Energy (DOE) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant, managed by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), has just won a celebrated Challenge.gov contest using technology developed for DOE.

To start from the beginning, a DOE Small Business Innovation Research project funded a Phase II application for WebLib to develop a novel search technology called semantic search.  Semantic search uses semantic knowledge of concepts and their relationships to produce relevant results, even when those results do not contain the user’s original query terms. The project was managed by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) which seeks to accelerate science by accelerating the spread of knowledge.  The goal of the project was to speed up literature searches by dramatically increasing the precision and completeness of searches of scientific and technical databases where the great bulk of the results of government R&D reside. To enable the development of semantic search, DOE OSTI provided WebLib with the DOE Green Energy Database to use as a test platform. 

WebLib made remarkable progress advancing the state of the art in search technology.  After just the first year of a two year grant, WebLib delivered its first cut at advanced semantic search technology.

The semantic search technology developed by WebLib was tested by OSTI which found that it was a significant advance over previous search technologies.  Subsequently, DOE deployed WebLib’s semantic search into the production version of the DOE Green Energy Database.  WebLib’s semantic search technology is so powerful and affordable that OSTI hopes to deploy it on eight more databases.

With its successful technology at hand, WebLib drove on and entered the...

Related Topics: apps, DOE Green Energy, NLMplus, SBIR/STTR, WebLib

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