Designed to include powerful text and data mining tools in the same environment, so analysts can easily use both techniques and gain when they are interactively combined
Chemical Abstracts Service and Fiz Karlsruhe have officially launched their new STN AnaVist software.
After months of extensive use in testing, the companies say that research professionals and other experts predict that STN AnaVist will quickly establish itself as a standard for patent and competitive intelligence analysis tools.
They are hailing STN AnaVist's innovative capabilities including its intellectually-based standardisation of fielded data from patent and non-patent literature, coupled with an interactive approach for viewing data relationships.
"STN AnaVist is an easy-to-use tool providing concise, graphically well-presented patent analyses" said Gisela Darges of Degussa.
"Of particular interest are the interactive linkages between the individual charts allowing for multi-dimensional viewing of selected criteria.
"The two- or three-dimensional research landscape is a promising new way to analyse and visualise document content.
"Such tools support innovation and trend research and can possibly shorten the time expended in R and D".
According to Nicolas Lalyre, patent information specialist at Syngenta: "the interactivity of the visualised data and the maps based on high-value databases make STN AnaVist a pioneering analysis and visualisation tool.
"For example, you can select an area of interest on the map and get simultaneously the key competitors, key inventors and database records related to this area".
Much of the STN AnaVist appeal results from its design, explained Anthony Trippe, a speaker and writer on patent information and competitive intelligence who served on the STN AnaVist development team.
"To benefit from both data mining and text mining approaches, analysts have needed to prepare different sets of data and work with multiple tools," explained Trippe.
" STN AnaVist was designed to include powerful text and data mining tools in the same environment, so analysts can easily use both techniques and gain when they are interactively combined".
STN AnaVist was developed to meet the need to assimilate and present information more effectively to derive greater value from search results and to support management in making business critcal decisions.
Key features of STN AnaVist include integrated content from multiple databases - users can search, analyse, and visualise data from multiple sources, including CAplus, PCT, and US full-text patent databases.
STN AnaVist offers the ability to uncover relationships among seven different fields within documents records, eg, companies, inventors, years, and concepts.
Data grouping and cleanup - a company name thesaurus appropriately groups companies and company name variations prior to the analysis.
Concept standardisation - application of CAS vocabulary standardises technology terms across the databases, reducing data scatter.
Interactive relationships among data and charts - the visualisation workspace makes relationships easy to see with highlighting of data during the analysis.
Flexible creation of results sets - results can be obtained through easy import of an existing answer set created in STN Express with Discover analysis edition, version 8.0, or using the integrated concept search capability in STN AnaVist.
STN has announced a special introductory offer for information professionals that provides STN Anavist at no charge for the software itself, effective through 31 December 2005.
Details and pricing information can be found on its website.
STN International is an online service for science and technology, offering a collection of more than 220 databases.
The service is provided jointly through a North American service centre, operated by CAS in Columbus, Ohio; a European service centre, operated by Fiz Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe, Germany; and a Japanese service centre, operated by the Japan Science and Technology Agency in Tokyo.
An international scientific service institution, Fiz Karlsruhe is dedicated to providing information services and solutions for both information management and scholarly communication.
For almost three decades, Fiz Karlsruhe has been offering its information services to scientists from all over the world involved in academic and industrial R and D, as well as to decision makers in business and administration.
In cooperation with national and international institutions, Fiz Karlsruhe produces and provides databases in various fields of science and technology, including the most distinguished patent files.
Its main business area is STN International (the Scientific and Technical Information Network).
CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, is an organisation of scientists creating and delivering digital information for scientific research and discovery.
CAS provides pathways to published research in the world's journal and patent literature-virtually everything relevant to chemistry plus a wealth of information in the life sciences and a wide range of other scientific disciplines-back to the beginning of the twentieth century.
In addition to offering STN in North America, CAS publishes the print version of Chemical Abstracts (CA), related publications and CD-Rom services; operates the CAS Chemical Registry; produces a family of online databases; and offers the SciFinder desktop research tool.
