|
 |
|
|
  Conference Cocktail   Conference Dinner & Entertainment 
 Monday lunch  
|
ICIC
The International Conference for Science & Business Information Nîmes, France 22-25 October 2006 This page last updated 16 October 2006. Programme as of this date.
Pierre Buffet (Questel-Orbit) and Harry Collier (Infonortics) In most of the 100 years since Chemical Abstracts and a few other information services began life, events in the world of scientific and technical information moved slowly and incrementally. In the past 10 years, however, change has speeded up, mainly as a result of more cost effective computing power, and the power of networking. In this survey of the past, the present and the future of the industry, two members of the information community for the past 30 years analyse the main forces impacting the information world – users and producers -- and forecast some of the dramatic implications that will make the next 10 years see changes take place “in Internet time”. New Product Presentations: Thomson Scientific / CAS
Blogs are self indulgent,
angst-ridden online diaries. Wikis are a free for all where anyone
can post any rubbish. RSS is another technology that no-one uses
and which is going nowhere. Wrong! Blogs are increasingly used
as a means of informing colleagues, users and clients of new
developments, product launches and events. They are even being
used to record and document the progress of R&D projects
and product development. And many industry gurus use blogs to
comment on what is happening in their sector. Wikis, as well
as being the technology behind many online encyclopaedias, are
ideal for developing documentation and encouraging collaboration.
RSS feeds are a superb way of keeping up with key events and
providing SDI, whilst helping the user deal with the perennial
problem of information overload. Jorge Manrique More than 97 percent of all scientific and technical information is in digital storage now. In the health sciences, we are facing growing challenges which can be addressed with the judicious application of technology:
Ten years ago, 34 universities began an initiative which was designed to take digital communications to the next level; the project was called Internet2. This presentation discusses how the intersection of science and technology will drive forward solutions to some of the problems listed above, and will discuss applications of high bandwidth Internet2 networks in the following applications:
Humberto Montenegro With the introduction of Espacenet,
the largest publicly available patent archive, in 1999, the era
of internet-based intellectual property information was born.
Subsequently, several patent offices began to expand their information
platforms to other intellectual property publications. In 2003,
some offices began to offer design databases electronically to
the public as an additional -- or even the sole -- way of publication.
However, the specific approach of each individual office made
the design information retrieval process more difficult. Each
design database has a different user interface, looks different,
and the search masks are not standardised. In addition, commercial
information providers did not offer a full coverage of designs,
as they did in the patent or trademark area. New Product Presentations: Prous Science / BizInt Solutions / Questel-Orbit / TEMIS Lunch (sponsored by FIZ CHEMIE Berlin) and Exhibition Gary Horrocks Dietmar Fauth The Siemens Corporate Information Research Centre (IRC) provides both technical and business information to Siemens employees worldwide. The following categories of services are offered:
The information IRC offers is acquired externally from hosts, brokers, full-text and reference database providers, research institutes, financial and market analysts, and the Internet. In this presentation, examples for the services mentioned above will be given and the customer structure will be outlined. An idea will we given regarding the challenges of marketing these products and services in the company and it will be explained how these are being dealt with. Finally, the presentation looks at the way the Siemens Information Research Centre might evolve over the next few years. New Product Presentations: Elsevier / FIZ Karlsruhe / STN Session Three: Data Catalogues and Comparisons Valentina Eigner-Pitto,
Josef Eiblmaier, Hans Kraut, Heinz Saller, Peter Loew, and Guenter
Grethe(a) Synthesis planning has always been a topic of interest in the field of chemical information, aiming to support the synthetic chemist in finding the optimal synthesis route to target molecules. This presentation discusses a new retrosynthetic approach, based on the automatic generation of transform libraries and verification of the results obtained in large reaction databases. The concept developed uses established search modes such as reaction substructure and role searching, enhanced by innovative algorithms such as reaction type and similarity searching. One of the key features of the approach is that reaction classification allows verification of the proposed retrosynthetic steps against databases containing chemical reactions reported in the literature. The classification algorithm categorises reactions automatically according to the chemical transformation they represent. This process provides a unique identifier (Reaction ClassCode) that allows organisation and linking of reaction databases in a chemically intelligent way. Name reaction filtering may also be applied to further refine the suggested synthetic pathways. Martin Brändle, Engelbert Zass In addition to the time-honoured printed catalogues, many different electronic information sources have become available for the procurement of chemicals. Examples are Web catalogues of individual suppliers, specialised search engines such as Chmoogle, and well- established catalogue databases such as ACD (Available Chemicals Directory), ChemSources, or CHEMCATS. This manifold of sources is complicated due to a variety of different interfaces, providers, and database versions. We present an overview of important sources and the corresponding interfaces, their availability, and the meta information provided. Finally, search results are compared for some examples using major sources. Marudai Balasubramanian Not long ago, there used to be too many small
and focused reaction databases for end-users/chemists. Many vendors
offered these reaction databases in different platforms. In order
to have a complete and comprehensive search done, end users/chemists
had to have access to all the databases. Due to budget restriction
and individual need, only a few organizations can afford to have
all these resources. In the last five years, the electronic age
has created an enormous increase in the production of a few large
and comprehensive reaction databases. The introduction of client-server-based
reaction databases access systems certainly attracted the greater
number of end users/chemists.
David Breiner Since 2003, the Cytec Information Center has undergone a radical transformation. From hiring new staff to launching a virtual library to integrating two information centres in North America and Europe, the Cytec CIC enables learning, idea exchange and innovation. As its mission, the CIC partners with Cytec Specialty Chemicals R&D to leverage appropriate technology in order to search, archive and disseminate internal and external information in a cost-effective, user-friendly manner. To achieve its mission, the Cytec CIC has designed and implemented a simple web portal for instant "one-stop" global access to technical information. Primary resources for external information include ACS, MicroPatent, Knovel, Elsevier ScienceDirect, Wiley Interscience, Teltech and SRI Consulting, while a web-based document management system is used for retrieving important internal information. In addition, the Cytec CIC has become a hub for cross-functional R&D activity by hosting scientific discussion forums, seminars and weekly poster sessions. This presentation will highlight experiences encountered during a Knowledge Management initiative including identifying system requirements, process design and implementation, organizational changes and lessons learned. John Trigg The introduction of an electronic laboratory notebook brings to an end a documentation process that has been in place for centuries. But it comes with enormous promise of benefits, a hefty price tag, and a certain amount of concern about long term data preservation and legal (patent) admissibility of electronic evidence. In addition, it represents a cultural change that may not be welcomed by some scientists. Nevertheless, it represents an important step towards engaging in the knowledge economy, but it is just a step! A successful implementation of an ELN will address the limitations of paper when it comes to collaboration, and it will provide a platform for an organisation to build and fully exploit its knowledge base. New Product Presentations: CISTI / Domex e-Data / CSA / Future Science / Search Technology Session Five: Data Management and Licensing Paula Zarrella Heck Hansruedi Kottmann The virtualisation of pharmaceutical and biotechnology R&D is a reality. Alliances and collaborations, in-licensing and out-licensing of targets, compounds, or technologies generate a large portion of new product revenue for many companies. Most organisations lack a robust business framework to be an attractive alliance partner with a nimble and rigorous decision process for opportunity evaluation and alliance management. The presentation looks at the alliance process in a holistic way and at some of the critical decision gates. Ramon Allende Hardware manufacturers, intelligence agencies for national security, credit risk assessment firms, pharmaceutical companies, banking institutions or auto-parts suppliers find text mining an excellent aid. Nevertheless, text mining has not yet become a mainstream technology because of two limiting factors:
bioalma's almaKnowledgeServer
(AKS) approach is to bring text mining to biomedical scientists´
desktops. Researchers do not need to become text mining experts
to benefit from text mining advantages. The AKS approach relies
on an offline process through which all the fundamental biomedical
concepts (genes, proteins, small molecules and atoms, drugs,
symptoms and biomedical terms and processes) are detected and
tagged. This provides the foundation for a knowledge base that
can be analysed later in a “transparent” fashion that
does not require any specialist expertise from the user. New Product Presentations: Beilstein / Vivísimo / Springer / EPO Session Six: The Frontiers of Search Diederik Braam-van-Vloten Archiving and searching large collections of electronic mail is becoming an increasingly important process as the daily flow of email messages is growing and companies are being held accountable for all information that they communicate. These days, auditors, compliance officers, customer service, and knowledge workers all need to search large collections of email or instant messages to be able to do their job. From a search engine perspective, searching in these large email collections is a challenge:
Auditors or compliance officers
require real-time full-text indexing of terabytes of data, enforcing
normal companies to process as much data as intelligence agencies
did in the end of the nineties. Parallel processing seems to
be the only solution. On top of all this, a typical auditing
or compliance application force users to have 100% recall. In
other words, these professional investigators want to find and
at least review every possible relevant email. However, as recall
accuracy goes up, the precision of these systems goes down. As
a result, analysing and organising all possibly relevant information
is a task that can take months and sometimes longer, thus seriously
delaying these processes. Jerome Pesenti This presentation begins by
discussing the challenge of information overload faced by organizations.
Search technology for ranking results is now mature. Returning
relevant results is no longer the issue, since today's technology
delivers millions of relevant results in milliseconds. The more
significant challenge in organisations is enabling users to process
meaningfully the large amount of relevant information available.
The simple, one-dimensional lists format of presenting results
is inefficient for gaining knowledge and insights from search
results. It causes information overlook as users are not able
to navigate the hundreds or thousands of results in an effective
manner and either simply ignore the deeper results or go through
pages and pages of irrelevant results to find that nugget of
information they are looking for. Charles Huot Until recently, text mining driven information
extraction in the Life Sciences has very much focused on mining
biological data. The recognition of genes and proteins and their
respective protein-protein interactions are prominent examples,
having a strong impact on the drug discovery research. Furthermore,
introducing preferred names and object identifiers for recognised
genes and proteins, is an important knowledge management element,
supporting the unified access to heterogeneous data. Such elements
thus can be used for cross-referencing scientific journals and
public databases. New Product Presentations: Minesoft / Wiley / Accelrys Frank Bilotto Federated search is most often
seen as a productivity tool, in that it can reduce the amount
of time needed for searching disparate resources. However, without
considerable refinements, it can be a blunt instrument. Pharmas,
and other similar organizations, need to know that the results
of a federated search produce information which is of high quality
and which has a known provenance. They also need to ensure that
the results are as all-inclusive as possible. William Town There are many sources of scientific information in common use today, which present a challenge to the information specialist or research chemist, who are often interested in finding data related to a particular chemical structure, but find it difficult to retrieve all related documents. A key barrier is that chemical structure information within those documents may exist only as a chemical name (IUPAC, trivial name, trade name, etc.), rather than in any structure-searchable form. Extracting chemical names from within these document sources is possible by using modern text extraction tools with semantic and contextual analysis of the source documents to identify candidate chemical names. These identified chemical names are used to generate chemical structures automatically, which are themselves used as index terms into the original source documents. Thus an apparently chemically-barren set of information sources can be transformed into a chemically-enriched source of information to drive future discovery. Conference Cocktail, Dinner and Entertainment at the Domaine du Grand Malherbes Cocktail Reception sponsored by Chemical Abstracts Service Dinner and Entertainment sponsored by Thomson Scientific Buses sponsored by TEMIS leave Novotel Atria at 18:45
The International Patent Classification (IPC) is aimed at providing a single scheme to organise and access the world's patent literature. Over time, a number of shortcomings of the IPC system have become apparent, especially as technology is moving rapidly. Consequently, it was decided to reform the IPC. After a short review of the reform, this paper will discuss the impact of the changes on searchers. The possibility of using the reformed IPC to track emerging technologies will be examined through practical examples. At a broader level, the adequacy of such classification systems to describe complex technological information will be discussed. Enrique R. Filloy-García The European Patent Office is implementing a Machine Translation Programme, with the aim to provide an automated service, capable of translating patent documents from English into the other national languages of the European Patent Organisation member states, and vice versa. The objective is to make the technical content of a patent document sufficiently understandable to a technically qualified person. The basic services of a trial system are fully operational and are internally available to the Office staff. The production system will be made available to the public during 2006. The initial phase is intended to provide the basic infrastructure for the machine translation system and the implementation of the first set of language pairs: English into/from French, German and Spanish. Subsequent phases will be designed to allow the progressive implementation of new language pairs as independent modules of the system, adapted to the pace of co-operation with the corresponding National Offices. Pierre Bernassau Carmen Nitsche In today's safety conscious world there is a strong and increasing emphasis on assessing the possible risk that new therapeutics may pose as early as possible, so that potential failures can be weeded out and resources can be focused on likely winners. Risk assessment is difficult because much of the published safety data is held in separate sources, with inconsistent or non-existent indexing. Even if a source can be identified as potentially relevant, it may take hours of paging through documents to find the required data. One particularly rich source of safety information is the FDA Approval Package for a new drug, and although this can be made available via the Freedom of Information Act, it is not well indexed or searchable, so locating specific facts (side effects, adverse events, etc) is tedious. In this paper we describe work that we have done to these and related relevant sources of safety data (preclinical, clinical and post-market) to make them searchable and accessible so that a wide range of drug safety and risk assessment questions can be answered in a way that can help reduce attrition in the drug development pipeline. Daniel Keesman This presentation describes
the difference between different data integration layers and
the relevance of semantic data integration in the early Life
Science Discovery process. The specific examples will show the
support of critical elements for the Lead Discovery and Target
Discovery process, integrating different sources, scientific
objects and information levels. Bernd-Jürgen Freitag ChemInfo is a web application developed at Novartis that provides access to a series of structure databases, by structure query or by data search on a few key items. The query is sent to the underlying search systems, results are collected and merged (grouped by structure) and provided as a single hit list. This hit list can be browsed using predefined layouts:
A search can be restricted to a subset of
databases as part of the search constraints or while browsing
results. In addition, manual (de)selection is implemented and
is preserved when switching from ungrouped to grouped display
and back, or when adding or removing data sources. ChemInfo can
be connected to any database system that provides either a command-line
interface, an Oracle cartridge or a web service and that accepts
a structure query in MDL Molfile, Smiles/Smarts or Rosdal format.
An ActiveX control is used to transfer queries from or to ISIS/Draw.
Display of the query and results is done without any plugin.
Data searches focus on category of information, not on data fields
in particular databases. Results and the underlying queries are
preserved and can be saved permanently by the user. |
