Makes NLM research more accessible to researchers, practitioners, industry experts, and public
Improves collection, use, and dissemination of information for NLM initiatives
The Lister Hill Center at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) is a research and development division of the NLM which seeks to improve access to high quality biomedical information for individuals around the world. It conducts and supports research and development in the dissemination of high quality imagery, medical language processing, high-speed access to biomedical information, intelligent database systems development, multimedia visualization, knowledge management, data mining and machine-assisted indexing.
Improve collection, use, and dissemination of biomedical information to target user groups. NLM supports a broad base of target users, including researchers, medical practitioners, industry experts, and the general public. Serving such a wide user set presents challenges, including:
- Information presentation
- Indexing and categorization
- Terminology
- Export and transmission
For over 15 years, Aquilent has provided NLM with software support services for complicated biomedical information needs. NLM's technology research and development initiatives seek to improve the following:
- Search-and-retrieval functionality
- Terminology translations
- Collection and electronic storage
- Content categorization
- Presentation
Examples of current projects at NLM that Aquilent supports include:
Boundary Marking Tool (BMT) and Multimedia Database Tool (MDT) — BMT and MDT are tools to store, analyze, and use a collection of cervix images and clinical data. BMT stores marks and annotations as a rich set of textual and image data for subsequent search and retrieval. MDT provides the capability to query multimedia biomedical databases.
Genetic Disease Home Reference — The Genetic Disease Home Reference is designed for the general public to learn about specific genetic disorders and the genes responsible for those disorders.
Information Retrieval and VISualization (IRVIS) — IRVIS explores new ways of organizing and presenting search results, characterizing available data, and assisting the user in formulating queries.
Medical Article Records System (MARS) — MARS is a system to automates production of bibliographic records for MEDLINE. The system scans and OCRs articles and automatically identifies specific metadata (e.g. article title, authors, affiliations, etc.) and reformats them to adhere to MEDLINE conventions.
NLM Gateway — NLM Gateway is a Web-enabled search system with the ability to search many of the NLM databases at the same time. Because the NLM has at least a dozen major web sites, the NLM Gateway is a useful tool for doing an overall search of the NLM's resources without having to check each source individually.
Semantic Knowledge Representation (SKR) — The SKR project was initiated to develop programs to provide usable semantic representation of biomedical free text by building on resources currently available at the Library, especially the UMLS Knowledge Sources and the Natural Language processing tools provided by the SPECIALIST system.
System for the Preservation of Electronic Resources (SPER) — SPER is an R&D project to prototype and investigate the key technical functions required to effectively preserve NLM’s digital resources over the long term. The resource materials include scanned and born-digital biomedical journals, articles, and important work of major figures in biomedical research. SPER focuses on:
- Assembling and storing sufficient resource-specific metadata
- Protecting a resource against technical obsolescence
