Our client, a leading pharmaceutical company, had a requirement to quickly analyse large amounts of research information.  This capability was necessary to enable them to rapidly absorb new research from a huge variety of commercial, academic, research and development sources and assess its impact on their current R&D initiatives. They also needed to analyse the information to identify new avenues for research.  Finally, they wanted to be able to subsequently retrieve any of this information through a classified, hierarchical indexing and free text search.

What We Did

Working with the organisation's epidemiology experts we managed a programme to design and introduce a number of information retrieval capabilities.

We started by introducing a categorisation engine that would automatically classify documents against the industry standard Medical Subject Headings (MESH) taxonomy.  This was integrated with other lexical resources that were specific to the organisation's R&D and commercial practices, to create a browseable output that matched the organisational working practices.  At the end of this phase we also introduced a free-text search capability.

The second phase of the project involved the design of a semi-automated workflow that extended the phase one work in a number of ways to simplify and enhance the researchers' capabilities.  The document capture and analysis processes were enhanced to enable incremental analysis of new documents.  The metadata identified from each document was extracted to a database where it was indexed for rapid retrieval.  Finally, a progressive enhancement process was designed to allow the categorisation parameters to be fine tuned to stimulate continual improvement in the quality of the analysis.

i-logue managed the project from inception and worked closely with the subject matter experts, internal systems architects and external software developers.

Outcome for The Client

This project started as a proof of concept technology investigation and ended with the development of a sophisticated and integrated analysis capability.

The client moved from a position of labour intensive manual analysis of research material to a significantly more timely and productive machine assisted capability.  This enabled the client to increase the pace of some aspects of their  research process, improve competitor analysis and also allowed them the time to explore new avenues on specific research topics.