Unilever Extends Collaboration With Transinsight In The Field Of Semantic Searching

PRLog (Press Release) – Feb 15, 2008 – Today’s searching is mostly split between Internet and intranet searches. The integration of both worlds under one semantic umbrella is the goal of a continuing collaboration between Unilever and Transinsight, provider of solutions for knowledge-based semantic search technology. Unilever has chosen Transinsight for corporate semantic searching.

“GoPubMed is a fantastic semantic search engine that fits the needs of most users searching biomedical literature from the MEDLINE database. But we believe that the system can lead to a lot more insight and time saving if users get the chance to ustomise the underlying knowledge base so that the system can be used to search the Internet as well as our in-house data”, says Wendy Filsell, a senior informatician in the Unilever Information Group. “For two years, GoPubMed has been in use at Unilever with great success in the fields of nutrition and metabolism, among others. We believe continuing to walk the road paved with semantic technologies from Transinsight will bring us better insights much faster.”

Transinsight’s search technology is made for the next generation of semantic searching. Its power lies in its ability to intelligently match huge amounts of textual material to very big classification networks like the Gene Ontology, MeSH or customer-tailored ontologies according to company needs. “Where traditional techniques take months we need only a few days,” says Dr. Liliana Barrio-Alvers, CTO of Transinsight. She continues, “We are proud to have developed a technology that is unparalleled worldwide when it comes to meaningful semantic searches. Transinsight’s core algorithms allow our customers to speed up their tedious daily work significantly because the search results are sorted in a smart way.”

The free search platform www.GoPubMed.org will benefit from the collaboration between Unilever and Transinsight since both parties have agreed to include many of the jointly developed features in the open search platform. “We know that GoPubMed helps the biomedical community when it comes to getting answers for more and more complex questions. The Wikipedia-like collaboration applied to the knowledge network makes the search more intelligent every day since the users improve it for the benefit of themselves and others”, says Dr. Michael R. Alvers, CEO of Transinsight.

About Unilever
Unilever’s mission is to add vitality to life. We meet everyday needs for nutrition, hygiene and personal care with brands that help people feel good, look good and get more out of life. Unilever is one of the world’s leading suppliers of fast moving consumer goods with strong local roots in more than 100 countries across the globe. Its portfolio includes some of the world’s best known and most loved brands including twelve €1 billion brands and global leadership in many categories in which the company operates. The portfolio features brand icons such as Flora/Becel, Bertolli, Dove, Lux, Pond’s, Lynx, Sunsilk, Omo, Cif and Domestos. Unilever has around 179,000 employees in nearly 100 countries and generated annual sales of €40 billion in 2006.

For more information about Unilever and its brands, visit www.unilever.com.