I2E OnDemand: Your Questions Answered
What is I2E?
I2E is the agile text mining system from Linguamatics that aids organizations in discovering and synthesizing knowledge from unstructured text in large document collections such as MEDLINE®. I2E is the market leading text mining software product in the life sciences sector. The technology makes a dramatic impact on users' speed to insight, decision making and hence competitive advantage.
Is Linguamatics now on the cloud?
Yes! For the first time, I2E is now available on a hosted services platform which companies can access, on demand, over the internet and pay for on a subscription basis.
What is I2E OnDemand?
I2E OnDemand is the software as a service (SaaS) version of our flagship product, I2E. The new product features the powerful NLP-based querying capabilities of the enterprise version. OnDemand thus offers smaller companies the advanced, high performance text mining capabilities that big pharma companies have been using for years.
How does I2E OnDemand actually work?
Linguamatics hosts the OnDemand service, which you access using your web browser. You need only have Java (free to download) installed on your machine.
How does I2E OnDemand compare to I2E Enterprise?
I2E Enterprise – the in-house version of I2E – is as before available to those users who want to have the software installed in house. I2E Enterprise ultimately offers greater flexibility in terms of content, ontologies and indexing choices. However, if you are a smaller organisation, department or team needing to extract facts, relationships and answers from MEDLINE, I2E OnDemand is probably the best solution for you.
What can I do with I2E OnDemand?
Like I2E Enterprise, I2E OnDemand is a text mining solution based on natural language processing that enables you to answer business-critical questions by extracting relevant facts and relationships from large document collections. Query results are returned in real-time as a structured table with relevant context. You can easily modify and compare queries to gain the balance of precision and recall you need. I2E OnDemand displays structured results in a browser window and you can easily drill down to the underlying evidence.
What documents can I access? How up-to-date are they?
I2E OnDemand provides a complete set of indexed MEDLINE abstracts (approximately 20 million documents) ready to be queried. This document set is updated weekly to ensure you have the latest version of MEDLINE.
Are there any ontologies or vocabularies included?
Linguamatics takes the MEDLINE source data set and uses I2E to process and analyze the text. To improve the analysis we use domain specific knowledge sources such as vocabularies, thesauri and ontologies, which help I2E to recognise synonyms and related words. The resulting data, which has been analyzed and tagged by I2E, is called an index, and it is this index that users run queries over.
The MEDLINE data is indexed with the broad terminologies, NCI Thesaurus™ and MeSH, plus specialized terminologies for chemicals, diseases and genes/proteins. These include terms and concepts from MeSH, NCI Thesaurus, Entrez Gene, UniProt and ChEBI.
And that's not all. In addition, I2E OnDemand incorporates domain specific techniques for improving the recognition and disambiguation of biomedical entities such as gene names. It also provides support for finding gene mutations. I2E can extract numerical information or measurements, for example to find typical dosages. Finally, I2E provides a large vocabulary for relationships between biomedical entities, e.g., gene-disease, chemical-gene/protein, and protein-protein interactions.
Why does I2E OnDemand only use MEDLINE?
MEDLINE is one of the most commonly accessed resources for research by the pharmaceutical and biotech industries.
Will you provide other document sources, such as patents?
Our long-term strategy is to add new data sources over time and therefore the service is expected to expand in the future. If you are interested in accessing particular data sets not already provided by I2E OnDemand, please contact your Linguamatics representative, or:
Do I have to set anything up?
If it is not already installed, you will need to download and install Java, available from http://www.java.com/en/download/index.jsp. You also need a web browser: we support Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 as well as Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8.
How does the I2E OnDemand service work?
Linguamatics runs and maintains I2E OnDemand, the MEDLINE index and a library of pre-built queries on our hosting platform. We provide you with a link to your own instance of the I2E OnDemand server, where you (and any other registered users from your organization) can log on using a secure SSL connection from your browser.
Once you have logged on, you can search MEDLINE using the library of powerful queries that we provide, or you can create your own queries. You can save queries and results either to your own, local PC or to your I2E OnDemand Server, where the files are available to share with other users from your organization.
How reliable is your service?
I2E OnDemand aims for 100% availability, being accessible virtually 24/7 except for maintenance. You will be notified in advance of scheduled maintenance by email and also system messages provided to you when you log on to the system.
How secure is it? Can anyone else see my data?
I2E OnDemand is accessed through the industry standard SSL protocol for transmitting private documents via the Internet. This technology ensures that you know the instance of I2E to which you are connecting and that any data sent from your browser to your I2E OnDemand server is kept confidential. Your organization is allocated its own private instance of I2E OnDemand and we provide login information only to approved users from your organization. Linguamatics employees may need access to your data if you require help from our support team, but will only do so with your permission.
Why would I choose I2E OnDemand instead of I2E installed in-house?
If you have a lot of your own data to analyze, I2E installed in-house is still most likely to be the best option. I2E is used by 9 of the top 10 large pharmaceutical companies. For large organizations, the benefits of being able to mine their choice of data justify the effort required to maintain an in-house deployment of I2E and the associated content.
If you want to search MEDLINE for information related to your research projects, then I2E OnDemand can offer a cost-effective solution. You still have to license I2E, but the really big saving comes from Linguamatics managing and maintaining the I2E OnDemand software, hardware and the MEDLINE index.
How might the performance of I2E OnDemand compare to an in-house installation?
Despite data being transferred across the internet, I2E OnDemand response times are typically similar to an in-house installation of I2E, but this will depend of course on your network and internet connection. However, if you find you are using I2E OnDemand extensively to run a large number of complex queries, you may want to consider the option of purchasing I2E to install on your own network. Once brought in-house, the installation can be optimized to provide you with the most responsive system possible.
Can I try it out before committing to buy?
Yes, you can request a free, no obligation, evaluation license, which lets you use I2E OnDemand for 2 weeks. However, please note that registering your interest does not mean you will automatically be allocated a free evaluation. We will discuss and assess your suitability to determine whether an evaluation license is the right option for you.
Once you have discussed your MEDLINE searching requirements with an account manager, it usually takes around 2 working days to set up your evaluation server.
How does the free trial work?
The trial lasts for two weeks and gives you the opportunity to test the full functionality of the I2E Express and Pro interfaces. The only difference is that the trial runs on a subset of the MEDLINE database.
I am using the trial software but not getting the result I was looking for or expecting. Why is this happening?
The trial version only contains a subset of MEDLINE and this means that your query may retrieve partial results. If you transition to the fully licensed version, Linguamatics provides the complete set of MEDLINE documents.
How do I get a license?
To start the process, please register your interest in I2E OnDemand. Registering does not represent any commitment on your part to purchase a license.
When you register we will ask you for your contact details and a password. This is the password you will use to log on to your I2E OnDemand account once it is set up, so please remember it. After you register, an account manager will contact you to discuss your requirements further, so it is important that you provide your telephone number and email address.
How much does I2E OnDemand cost?
The 2 week evaluation license is free. Please contact us to discuss your requirements for a full license:
We look forward to hearing from you.
What is text mining?
Text mining is the ability to analyze unstructured or semi structured text and derive concepts, structure and relationships from it. It is an alternative to and more powerful approach than traditional search engines, which use keywords in documents as a way of finding information. Text mining interprets the meaning of the text.
What makes text mining so exciting?
Information based decision making is absolutely critical to most organizations, and to the life sciences sector in particular. Given the breadth and scale of the data they work with, and the importance of the research function within new drug development, efficient and cost-effective use of information can provide new discoveries, product innovations and faster time to market, as well as operational efficiencies.
What is MEDLINE?
MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine's premier bibliographic database covering the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and the preclinical sciences.
Who are Linguamatics and what does the company do?
Linguamatics is the leading provider of NLP (Natural Language Procession) based text mining software for the life sciences sector. The company was founded in 2001 and the I2E text mining platform has been commercially deployed since 2003. Linguamatics is fully committed to flexible and powerful text mining that empowers people in carrying out research. To this end, the company invests heavily in being a “thought leader” in the industry. The company also takes a customer-focused and collaborative approach to business development and continues to grow its product portfolio in response to market demand and technological developments.
Where can I get more information?
You can find more information by downloading the I2E OnDemand datasheet or visiting the I2E OnDemand webpage.
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