Data System Services -Discovery Logic

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Connecting People to Projects to Ideas - Turning Data Into Knowledge

Databases are the heart of Discovery Logic.

The utility of a database is determined by the quality of the data itself and the ways in which that information can be manipulated and combined with other data. The contents of a database are not yet knowledge; they resemble the random scribbles on a notepad that may, after considerable mental processing, lead to a strategy or thesis. Data acquires value when it is transformed through algorithms or other tools to produce new knowledge that can answer specific questions.

The National Institutes of Health's central grants database contains data about R&D grants - very specific data that has vital but limited uses. These uses are restricted to the ability to identify which individuals have a grant, which project officer is responsible for that grant and which government organization funded the work. By linking this data to data in other databases, Discovery Logic provides highly enriched knowledge about the researchers, including their publications, co-author networks, their location, the impact of their work, patents and inventions derived from their work, and other qualities that are specific to our clients needs.

The culmination of all of our work in scientific computing is ScienceWire™, an infrastructure of interlinked open source and proprietary databases.

The following sources represent a sample of the ScienceWire™ data sets. We continually update these resources and develop and apply algorithms to derive more value.

NLM MEDLINE® (health topics, drugs and supplements, medical encyclopedia, MeSH, other topics. Source: National Library of Medicine)
ISI Web of Knowledge® Select (citations, journal performance metrics, subject categories. Source: Thomson Reuters)
USPTO Patent Applications and Issued Patents (Source: US Patents and Trademark Office)
News and current events (Source: LexisNexis®)
Drugs@ FDA and the FDA Orange Book (approved drug products. Source: US Food and Drug Administration)
RAND RaDiUS® (US government grants and R&D contracts from 1994-2007; Source: RAND Corporation)
NSF Award Information (National Science Foundation grants and contracts from 1972-2008)

Discovery Logic has expanded and customized many of these databases for specific uses. For example, MEDLINE® lists co-authors for its 17 million abstracts, but does not include publication citations. To mitigate this problem, Discovery Logic creates linkages between MEDLINE data and citation data derived from the ISI Web of Knowledge® Select. Moreover, the ISI database itself is maintained at Discovery Logic where we add value by building continually updated links to additional databases.