Tracking what you know, finding what you don't, putting it all together

Life science specialists have been trying to develop technologies which combine the capabilities for searching and comparing multiple ontologies with approaches for secure collaboration, but this is a challenging problem. After an extensive 10 yr research effort, Sun Labs have produced a set of tools and methods for taxonomy management and mapping, with data-taxonomy linkage.

NOVA is a sophisticated, semantic inference, language-independent search engine embedded in a Portal solution based on open-standards. This facilitates automated trolling, harvesting, categorizing, organizing and distribution of data. Additionally, it facilitates invocation of services, based on specified roles, identity and entitlement - helping you determine what you know and what you don't, but limiting /who/ gets to know /what/.

NOVA is designed with patented semantic inferencing that recognizes new words (e.g., new proteins, peptides). It can relate them, in turn, to known nodes, with passage-retrieval so that your collaborators can be directed to the specific section(s) that you are calling attention to in the documents that you are sharing. This is all accomplished without the requirement to translate any documents into a single format or to house the digital assets within a single storage repository. Through efforts with our partners and customers that we will present here, the technology has been: extended to handle rapid knowledge growth; adapted for life science ontologies including GO & NCI Oncology - in OWL and RDF; and is scaling to > 100 TB of digital resource harvesting and management.