Knowledge beyond words » News releases

How to create biomedical gadgets in a few steps

Valentin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:23:02 +0000

We are glad to announce the launch of the biomedical gadgets working thanks to the novoseek’s API. The use of the biomedical gadgets is open to everyone and free. You can get your API Key today and start using the gadgets to extract relevant biomedical information from novoseek and to create biomedical gadgets. In order to create biomedical gadgets, you just have to follow a few steps to publish it on your website or blog.

Gadgets will allow you to publish biomedical information where you want. Gadgets can be published on your blog, website…(where scripts are accepted) and will alllow you to easily extract information from the literature according to your query. With the gadgets you will:

Enrich your content
Integrate valuable data
Display more information
And no need to know about programming.

There are at this time 2 types of gadgets:

The Key Concept Gadget allowing you to display the information related to any biomedical concept.
The Document Gadget allowing you to display the most recent documents related to your search.

Through an intuitive interface, you will create handy gadgets in a few seconds and will be able to publish a gadget where you need it and modifying it as many time as you want. You are also able to create multiple different gadgets.

Let’s have a look at the possibilities brought by the gadgets with a few examples:

Insert a Document gadget on your Diabetes blog sidebar to keep readers updated on the most recent scientific publications.

Example: 10 latest publications for Diabetes.

Insert a gadget in your sidebar to show your publications to your readers

Example: Bertalan Meskó’s publications.

Insert a gadget to show the most relevant disease, pharmacological substances, genes & proteins, chemical substances, organisms, organs & body parts, tissues, biological functions, procedures-techniques, journals, authors -a combination of them or all of them- related to your query.

Example: Tissues, Biological functions and Procedures/techniques related to “chronic granulomatous disease”

Match the gadget design to your blog’s.

The examples shown previously have a style by default but you can easily change the design colors, width and height during the creation of biomedical gadgets.

Last but not least, we recommend you to watch the tutorial video about the gadgets to see how easy it works.

We’d love to hear from you and know how you are using the gadgets, so feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.

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We didn’t do it

Valentin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:31:22 +0000

There has been quite a surprise yesterday on the world wide web as the redesigned version of Pubmed was released once and for all all of a sudden, like said Stephanie Fulton on twitter. However this was almost a non-surprise as it was taken off almost right away and made Librarian EagleDawg write about it. In fact, it looks like Pubmed expected technical difficulties releasing the redesigned version of its search engine.

Guys, we would like all of the Pubmed users to know that we -novoseek- are not responsible at all for this and that we did not touch or unplug Pubmed at any moment .

You can click the image to view it in 1280 x 800 pixels and save it to your computer.

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Take your searches to the next level with my novoseek

Valentin — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:58:33 +0000

If you are a fellow reader of the blog, or more simply have come once in a while to read us, you must be aware that we are not used to talking about our product on the blog.
However today we feel entitled to make an announcement about novo|seek. Indeed, we have just released new features to the system and we feel the need to share them with you. This new features release is called my novo|seek.

Why « my » you’ll ask ? Simply because now, novoseek takes into account what you are doing when you are using the search engine, thanks to your personal account on novoseek.

Sign up and enjoy your personal space on my novo|seek. You shall enjoy some of the functionalities we have developed for you. What are these new functionalities? They are features you have been asking for since novoseek has been launched and since you have been involved in the development of your new biomedical search engine.

As soon as you are subscribed, you will discover these features :

Search history
Save searches and create alerts
Manage labels
Manage your account

Users are really enthusiasts regarding these new options as they allow them to go beyond regular searching and make their daily tasks much nicer. Let’s step into each of them to know more about their functionality and their use.

Search history : no matter what you look for in novoseek, your searches will be marked there. Should you need to retrieve that search where you read that paper, just look for it in your search history.
Saved searches & alerts : once you are satisfied with a research, you can chose to save it simply by clicking the « save search & create alert » link. Chose the name for saving this search and you are done. Additionnaly, you can set up an alert for this search. Why is this great ? because the alert will let you know when new articles are released in that field.
My labels : another great option that will allow you to organize one or several set of documents. Imagine that you are working on that research you must prepare for Dr Bradley. Well, you just have to tick the documents you want and apply them the desired label by clicking on « label » and chose one of create a new one.

These are not the only new functionalities you can now enjoy as now you can export citations in the *.RIS format or select articles by publication type.

Signing up is as simple as these 3 steps:

Now, if you want to discover my novo|seek through a tutorial video, watch below:

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Considerations around the upcoming pubmed enhancements

Valentin — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:59:25 +0000

The idea for this post came to me while I was conversing with a relative. She is a medical resident and informed me that she had to start using Pubmed overnight and happened to find it a bit complicated. Consequently, I could confirm that Pubmed is pretty hard for novices to use and took advantage of the opportunity to pitch novoseek to her. Should I remind you that novoseek is a free, easy and intuitive biomedical search engine? Anyway, this discussion with my relative reminded me that some time ago, I heard (thanks to fellow followers present on the MLA in Hawaï) that Pubmed was about to enhance its interface this summer.

This announcement is actually big news for the life sciences community as Pubmed, the search engine of the National Institute of Health, is one of the most used among the choices offered on the web today. Due to the amount of queries it has every day, improving the user experience was something normal and expected. Alisha Miles (a medical librarian for a non-profit hospital in Georgia) declared: “these all sound like wonderful improvements. Hopefully, we will get to a point where we can provide input to NLM before some changes are rolled out“.

Interestingly, these changes aim to make it “easier to use“, will “simplify the interface” and “refresh the look” and offer “better organized text on screen“. It is interesting that Pubmed is moving towards a simpler user interface, as novoseek has been doing this from the beginning.

If you are not familiar with Pubmed, let’s have a look at the screenshot below in order to realize how the layout organized currently.

Compare it to novoseek’s current layout.

We acknowledge that a change -as slight as it can be- was necessary. Indeed, Pubmed is difficult to use. It requires learning, training and improving skill to handle it properly. This is why there are many resources (Check this for instance: 18 ways to improve your pubmed searches) and classes about it. The changes will be the following:

The tabs will disappear
A narrower top banner
Combination of Abstract and Abstract +
“+” below each citation
“Send to” option a lot more visible
The right column will be wider and occupies almost 25% of the screen. It will show: the related articles, “Also try” option and recent activity

If you want to have a sneak preview of what it’ll look like you can check directly on David Gillikin’s presentation, although the images are not optimized for viewing on purpose. To make a long story short: Pubmed is about to go a bit more social and current.

Obviously, I have to compare these changes to novoseek’s features. Pubmed currently has more functions than novoseek. However, novoseek has been developed from the beginning with the goal of making it an easy to use, simple and fast biomedical search engine. Now Pubmed seems to be going that way, too.

In addition, we are adding new functions according to your needs. You can now check your search history, save searches and articles, create alerts and manage labels through my novoseek. These are functions we have developed according to the users’ expectations. Indeed, being close to users through twitter, uservoice make interactions and quick answers to their questions possible. We believe it is one of our strenghts against Pubmed.

Should you need to discover how to use novoseek to the best of its ability, you should have a look at the presentation below:

Unleashing The Power Of Novoseek

View more presentations from novoseek (search engine by bioalma).

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Swine Flu party 1 – People awareness 0

Valentin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 07:01:31 +0000

There was much concern some time ago when the swine flu pandemics began to spread from Mexico to the USA and Europe. Then we somehow got overwhelmed by other information such as the Air France flight crash in the Atlantic or Michael Jackson’s death. Now it seems that the swine flu has come back again (or are the medias putting more emphasis on it?) as everyday more people get infected and die. The WHO (World Health Organization) increased the Pandemic level to Phase 6 -equal to widespread human infection- as shown in image below.

At the same time, a strange phenomenon is going on: the swine flu parties. What’s a swine flu party, you’ll ask? It consists of organizing a party where one of the attendee is someone infected with the Swine Flu virus. Therefore it pretends to help healthy people catch the virus and consequently grow immune against it. This very strange and unexpected practice is growing popular among people as we can read on this article on the Independant where this 15 year old girl states that she would “prefer to get it now, rather than next year which is my final GCSE year, and because apparently it’s going to be the winter version of the disease that will be more dangerous“. Reading this I started to look for further information and happened to be very surprised at people starting to organize parties and looking for infected people. A first look at Facebook (a reference when dealing with organizing a party) left me speechless…

Obviously, this practice is growing popular. People argue that they are used to doing the same with Chicken Pox for their children. But are they? Do people really do that?

Let’s get things straight and explain why I think this is an irresponsible behavior. It is understandable that some of the people think it is better to catch it now before it mutates and become stronger. Nevertheless there are way more risks than benefits to this kind of behavior:

Nobody knows how will the virus act on every single person. We can’t yet plan its consequences and development so it is very risky. As declared Richard Besser (Head of US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ) “…how an individual person will be impacted by the infection is not something that we know“.
We shouldn’t forget that once someone is infected, he’s likely to infect more people. Among them, some may be weaker: children, elderly people, pregnant women, with health condisions, etc and be seriously injured by the virus.
…

For more information on the spread of influenza virus, have a look at this study “Modeling the Worldwide Spread of Pandemic Influenza: Baseline Case and Containment Interventions“.

Now I’m asking you: Would you go to one of them?

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Wolfram Alpha: 5 cons and 5 pros

Valentin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:48:00 +0000

Is it necessary to present Wolfram Alpha, the new online research tool everybody is talking about those days? Obviously not! This is why we prefer to express our thoughts on it in 5 cons and 5 pros about Wolfram Alpha

5 cons on Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine but a Computational Knowledge engine. What in earth does this stand for?

Easy: Wolfram Alpha is not able to perform searches in an easy way. You have to put search terms with the right and correct words!

What kind of information is available in Wolfram Alpha?

Not a lot. Alpha is very specific. The best you can look for is mathematics, chemical compounds, dates, units or even the temperature in Madrid…Don’t get disappointed, we’ve warned you.

Wolfram Alpha is not clever on the contrary to what it claims to be

Information retrieval is based on a semantics and words tagging. With Alpha, if a word has not yet been tagged for one of its meanings in a context, you won’t get anything of it. What a pity! For example, try to ask it “Who discovered polonium?. It is not able to answer, while in google the same question is easily answered.

Wolfram Alpha is for hype people!

I mean, who is going to ask “How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?” in order to have this result mentioning Bob Dylan. What if we ask “Who is Luke’s father?“, well, here goes the answer namely not much.

Wolfram Alpha is not a resource for biomedical information.

Despite what you’ve heard about it, Alpha doesn’t provide life science publications as novoseek does.

5 Pros on Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha, this is not a search engine! It’s better.

The way information is treated and presented is far from what you’ve seen and experienced until now. It is not Google nor Wikipedia. It is able to “computate” almost anything you ask it. Try solve a x^2 + b x + c = 0 for x

Wolfram Alpha could revolutionize learning and searching on the internet

Although it takes much to learn how to use it and obtain effective results, it could be an interesting tool for pupils, students and professors.

Wolfram Alpha has some surprises and easter eggs for you to discover.

Here goes the top 10 easter eggs in wolfram alpha. There may be more, it’s up to you to look for them.

The Wolfram Alpha team is working hard to keep it updated.

If there are some failures, be patient and for sure they’ll be fixed soon. The “Give us your feedback” box at the bottom of pages is there for you to point out these.

They are working on making Wolfram Alpha more user friendly

According to statements, they will release an API and more detailed search boxes in order to make searches easier.

Obviously, search engines on the internet are bringing changes and new ways of accessing information. Is this another step towards web 3.0 ?

We recommend you to read:

Is the Swine Flu infecting social medias?

Valentin — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:13:41 +0000

Swine Flu epidemics started a couple of weeks ago now and it has been largely covered in social medias. By social medias, I mean all those platforms where one is able to speak and share real-time information about swine flu. Like for other recent and outbreaking news, real-time information has shown its great and useful possibilities. In fact, recently they have been consulted and used to be broadcasted on mainstream channels such as television. I will insist on the “Twitter thing“, but not only and this is why we can talk of social medias.

The importance of Twitter has been largely acknowledged these past months. For example, this man twitting directly about the plane landing in the Hudson river or the Mumbay attacks. These are examples who have settled a new order in information releases. On one because people like you and me would be likely to become reporters -would they want it or not- able to release information and pictures. On the other hand because it would get people involved and react to attacks, threats or needs faster, as it was done for this hospital in Mumbai.

However, Swine Flu is pretty different: the epidemics is best managed by the WHO organization and there is few people like you and me could do besides informing about what is this disease about (H1N1, Influenza, etc). Are social medias information relevant for Swine Flu ? Is everyone entitled to speak about the Swine Flu on real time information platforms and social medias? Are there limits to one’s use of twitter? And, most importantly, are social medias infected with Swine Flu?

I was stuck by the amount of information people have been releasing on Swine Flu, regardless their specialty or their areas of interest. It just seems everybody had something to say and something to share on that matter. I admit that I (as part of the marketing team) decided too to enjoy this phenomenon to put a search example on H1N1 and swine flu in novoseek. But hey, we’re not the black sheep, other search engines did so, I’ll let you guess which ones.

To give you an idea of the phenomenon, let’s check on trends for swine flu in twitter. Obviously it’s been a hot potato on twitter. But not only. And interestingly, searches for this term experimented a great increase…that quickly dropped.

I understand this is something legitimate –getting worried and twitting about it. However not all of the twitts seem to be justified nor important. Indeed, people started joking about it or -even worse- spreading false information. And I sense that the “you can get swine flu by eating pork” comment is about to become a famous example. Trustworthy people have already been writing about it.

Don’t get me wrong, the problem is not in people joking about swine flu but in the information reliability. Since everyone can follow the hot news using the # hashtags in Twitter Search, it triggers a debate. How to find reliable information among users? Who can be trusted? Who should be avoided ? These are questions that matter-of-factly appear to me and should raise your conscience too.

According to the following statistics for Swine Flu in Google Trends we notice that the drop of interest is almost as fast as its rise. Are we dealing with a serious pandemics here, or just some buzz effect? I am wondering…

The fact is swine flu has had its days and information –good or bad- has spread like fire over social medias. People would speak about it on Facebook too. This map shows how people have been updating their status mentioning “swine flu” in it. It has gone west to east.

This is a good illustration of how people started mentioning swine flu in social medias regardless the reliability or truth of information they would state. One more example, people would start making business over it and enjoying the phenomenon, worries or hysteria (no matter how you call it)… It seems like using the Swine Flu keyword was the key to success. You don’t believe me? Have a look at this advertisement in Google when you perform a search for “prevent swine flu“.

You’ll tell me that it’s always been this way, people would tend to enjoy people’s worries and buzz events. But I fear that Swine Flu has reached a new step.

Where are we going with social medias? Is the epidemics matter enough for people to be entitled to tell all sort of things over the internet? Do we have to find a way to select and filter our contacts ? Should we move to other (new?) platforms? There are questions I don’t know how to answer but I’d sure like to have your opinion about.

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Hello world!

allende — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:33:41 +0000

Hello World

Hello world is the basic sentence for a programmer who is learning a new language or testing a new piece of code. I wanted to use this tag because it is the same thing here. It is our first post, we are starting our test of a new language, a so called corporate blog.

You are probably thinking: “Oh!!! a corporate blog, ah!!! One of those places where they will write about their product all the time, yes!!! how interesting??”

Don’t get me wrong, it is not like we are not going to talk about our product or our company, it’s a part of what we are and if we evaluate the time we dedicate to our job, I must say it’s a substantial one. However our goal with this blog is to give our perspective of the information technology in the biomedicine market: web 2.0, search engines, social networks, health 2.0, user experience, our experience with users, text mining, technology, biomedical resources in the Internet and why not, business strategies.

We just hope to be able to transmit our enthusiasm, dedication and excitement to our goal of helping the life science community to deal with data and information.

By the way, I have to thanks Darryl Leon for coming up with, what ended to be the name of this blog: Knowledge beyond words