#disqover

What is it, do you think, that makes you product stand out? One of the best ways to find that out is by simply asking your customers. And that’s what we did.

Mid-September 2015, we went to Harvard Medical School to sit down with a group of experienced users of our product DISQOVER. The goal: find out what they like about DISQOVER and what they believe is needed next. In short: we asked a group of 9 experienced and very active users of DISQOVER - mainly researchers and data scientists - to co-create our product roadmap.

Here’s how we approached our user group meeting:

Firstly, we set the scene: we explained the users where we are today, what the latest features of our product are and what’s next in the pipeline.

Then, we asked each participant to write down on a post-it her/his top 4 functionalities and top 4 databases that (s)he would like to see in DISQOVER.

Next, everyone posted her/his ideas on a wall. We clustered like-minded ideas and concepts to examine further what could be put into development.

To finish of the meeting, we asked the attendees 1) whether the session was valuable to them and 2) whether they would recommend DISQOVER to other potential users.

This feedback has now been added to our product roadmap. We’re still reviewing some timelines, but overall priorities have been set: 

“With the  addition of cell lines, antibodies etc. I would also be inclined to recommend  to researchers in R&D” Corporate Strategy Expert

“Yes, other  R&D institutes and large organizations can use this, like MIT labs,  Harvard etc.” MD

Tips for user group meetings

User group meetings are a great tool to generate business insights. Here are some general insights we took away from this session:

Chose experienced users: bring together a group of diverse but very experienced users. That way, you quickly get pinpointed requests. It’s better to avoid very generic requests that could be interpreted in various ways.

Create the right setting and clearly guide people. Tell participants exactly what it is you expect from them, and in what format. Stay focused and don’t stray from your objective.

Provide feedback back: facilitate interaction, join in the discussion and afterwards, send the resulting feedback to the users. That’s very important. Give them an overview of the ideas that were covered and what your next step will be. Even if it is not explicitly decided yet, underline that as well. People can handle a postponed decision as long the reason behind it is clearly explained.

Take the actions on board: user group feedback is not arbitrary; you have to be willing to take at least some of it on board. If not, you might as well not hold user group meetings.

Don’t jump in blindly: make sure you already have a good understanding of the concerns of your users. If you’re completely surprised by some of the suggestions, than you haven’t been in touch with your users well enough. The outcome should not be a complete overhaul of your product, but rather incremental updates.

What’s next?

This first user group meeting delivered great insights that help us build our product roadmap. But at the same time, it’s also reassuring that the exercise did not uncover any major discrepancies between us and our customers. This tells us that we’re on the same frequency and level as our users.

We are now actively using this to build our product roadmap. After all, when people take the time to provide you with feedback, it’s only right to thank them by taking their comments on board. We’re also reviewing whether we can hold more regular user group meetings using a webinar-like format. That way, we can have an even broader and more diverse user group. Look out for future sessions on this blog and our website.

Was it Henry Ford who said…

This is a question I get quite often: what is semantic search? I’ll give you the short and not-so-short answer. As well as some possible applications which we’ve included our own semantic search platform.

Semantic search in short

In short: semantic search extends the current search possibilities by looking at 1) the intent of the searcher as well as 2) the context within which the search takes place. When properly combined, you get more refined and better attuned search results.

OK, that makes sense. But when you do this on the general web, the task of uncovering intent and context becomes quite challenging. Imagine you’re planning a business trip to Paris. You go to Google and type in the keywords ‘Paris’ + ‘Hilton’, only to get dozens of celebrity pages. You’ll have to refine your keyword string (no pun intended!) to get to the actual Paris branch of the hotel chain.

And yes, Google is already making some assumptions and offers you some additional keywords to try and understand your intention better, but much of that is still after the fact.

Semantic search, not-so-short

Semantic search becomes a lot more actionable when you place it in a pre-defined context, such as an industry or a company. Instead of offering ‘best guesses’, the search technology can more quickly make assumptions about intent and context and fine tune the results accordingly.

Consider an R&D-driven industry like life sciences. What we do there, is connect different data sources (open and closed public data, internal and third party data) and tie it all together. We create an ontology, by which we mean that different descriptions for the same thing are given a unique identifier. So the system knows that ‘male’ is the same as ‘m’, is the same as ‘masculine’, and so on. That way, data from an unlimited number of different data sources can be compared and meaningful results can be generated. The strength of semantic search is that it can do this for an unlimited number of categories.

Semantic search and Big Data

In this way, semantic search overcomes the 4 Vs of Big Data: volume, velocity, variety and veracity. Making connections between ever-growing mountains of data and widely differing data sources is fueling the need for semantic search.

With semantic search, it doesn’t matter how many different databases you search in. The system will make the corresponding links between the bits of information and present it in a meaningful manner to you.

Semantic search reveals unexpected connections between your search query and different data sources. Consequently, it retrieves data you didn’t know you were looking for. Unlike regular search, which is mostly descriptive, semantic search can be both predictive and prescriptive. Semantic search makes you a whole lot smarter.

Semantic search also uncovers interconnections and relationships between data. Data is combined, compiled and represented in a meaningful way. Your data is enriched, making it more valuable.

Semantic search applications

Here are some cool items we’ve added to our own DISQOVER semantic search platform:

Saved search queries and collaboration: name your search, save it and share it with colleagues. Others can rerun your search, extend it or choose a different path, somewhere along the line, in order to uncover alternative routes for discovery. Collaborating with others on search patterns becomes a lot easier.

Rerun your saved searches. Because data changes all of the time, your research findings will change too. With saved searches, any new data since your last search, will automatically be included in your rerun. That way, you no longer miss out on relevant updates. The saved search path lets you revisit your search on a later date and rerun, resume or change it as you see fit.

Visualize data. The big bang of big data makes deriving insights hard. Visualization helps to better understand search results and facilitates telling a better data story. As your search progresses, our DISQOVER platform automatically updates the search result visualizations while new search criteria are offered for additional refinement. By simply adding or removing search filters, you can zoom in or out on the findings.

Depict the source. Instead of just giving you a search result list, we also create compiled content pages with data from different sources. But because it may be worthwhile to know which data comes from which source, we color code each part. That way, as a (re)searcher, you can define which information is more relevant or reliable, or which sources you would like to research further.

“The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.” Tim Berners Lee

Everybody becomes a data scientist

Semantic search will become a lot more smarter soon. With ever more data becoming available—including also sensory data of where you are and what you’re state of mind is—generating useful search results will continually become more refined. Until then, companies can already create the right context and generate big wins with semantic search. Semantic search makes complex searches available to all, turning everyone into a data scientist.

How well is data and information management handled at your company? Are you using Big Data? Have you heard of semantic search? These were some of the questions we asked people at the Knowledge For Growth 2015 convention (May 2015). As a semantic search company, we learned that there’s still some education to be done around it. But, looking at it positively, semantic search is considered to be a highly relevant asset for many people within the life sciences industry. Here are the results of our survey.

Our hostesses looking for respondents.

The information and data age The Knowledge For Growth 2015 convention in Ghent welcomed 1100 attendees, and we were able to get feedback from 127 people in total (+/- 10% of attendees). When asked ‘how well is your company managing healthcare and life sciences information today?’, 47% of respondents stated that information is managed `well’ to `very well’, while 42% indicated that it is `not handled well’ to `quite well’. Which is quite shocking really, as the life sciences industry is highly dependent on properly unlocking information to fuel innovation. A point made also by Peter Piot in his morning keynote speech, when he talked about data and information as a driver for life sciences.

The attendees at the convention are very active and fervent searchers for information. 46% of the respondents spend more than half an hour each day searching for information.

With so much search activity going on, improving the accuracy and speed of search results can have a dramatic impact on overall productivity. The respondents acknowledged this: 43% of them believed that improved search functionalities could improve productivity by 20 to 50 per cent. Fourteen per cent considered the increase in productivity to be even more than 50%.

Democratizing data Because data and information disclosure is so important, we asked people how easily accessible this data is. While 35% of respondents indicated that most people within their company have data access and that they can manage the data themselves, the other 65% indicated that they are limited in some form or other to access the data.

In order to fuel innovation, though, step one is to have unrestricted, ready access to the data. This is often referred to as the democratization of data. A trend that is on the rise in recent years, also with the emphasis on more open innovation and more open collaborations across company borders.

The Big Data frenzy The Big Data hype is far from over but, in practice, there’s still very little that’s truly Big Data driven. Only 15% of respondents stated that the majority of their data activities are Big Data driven or that there is a fully integrated Big Data strategy. But a shocking 45% of respondents stated that there is no Big Data activity whatsoever, while another 12% said that they’re working on it.

Searching semantically One way of mining huge amounts of heterogeneous data is through ‘semantic search’. This terminology, however, doesn’t yet ring a bell for 60% of the people.

When briefly explained what semantic search is, 37% thinks that it would be of great benefit to their business. A percentage that increases to 45% for the people already familiar with semantics.

A semantic future Every industry that is driven by data, is challenged to create more value out of that data. And increasingly, that is literally ‘every’ industry. But limited data access, a lack of data democratization, a lack of Big Data initiatives and poorly designed search capabilities are causing companies to lose money. Technologies such as semantic search can quickly close the gap between ‘searching blind’ and ‘finding relevant results immediately’. Semantic search can separate different meanings, it categorizes them and presents the results in a filtered and clustered manner, so that the most relevant information can be pinpointed quicker and easier. Because of its extreme scalability, it can be applied to a virtually unlimited number of data sources. Semantic search ‘glues’ the relevant data together as Linked Data in order to generate more meaningful insights. Try out DISQOVER, our semantic search technology, for free for 14 days. After all, the best way to find out what semantic search can do for you and your company is to try it out.

About the survey: the data used in this blog was collected via a survey during the Knowledge For Growth 2015 convention (May 2015) at the International Conference Center in Ghent, Belgium. There were approximately 1,100 attendees from hundreds of different life sciences organizations.  Two hostesses roamed the convention’s floor with iPads (and printed survey forms) to capture the feedback. Attendees were approached randomly. A total of 127 people completed the survey and were offered a free smoothie at the ONTOFORCE stand in return.

Some events are absolutely great and `Knowledge For Growth 2015’ fitted the bill perfectly. A big crowd (±1,100 people) of highly relevant life sciences people, a wide range of different topics, enthusiastic speakers, 90+ exhibitors, and yes, the food was great too. Here’s our report from K4G 2015.

The importance of biotech

It’s not every day a fair is opened by … a bell. The Euronext Bell Ceremony at 9 o’clock demonstrated the growing relevance of biotech on the Brussels stock market. Biotech’s market value has grown fast these past few years to €15+ billion and I’m sure many of us are looking to add even more value to this.

Peter Piot, Director & Professor of Global Health, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, was the first to take the stage. He summed up some of the major global health challenges we’re faced with today: ever-more resistant bacteria, insects that are immune to pesticides, climate change, ageing populations, … There are many things we can and must do to remedy these challenges. Professor Piot strongly emphasized the importance of 1) public private partnership models as well as 2) innovation to do this.

“It’s not just about delivery in innovation, it’s also about innovation in delivery.”

Peter Piot, @Knowledge For Growth 2015, keynote presentation, May 2015

Professor Piot had already referred to mobile and smartphones as a means to bring healthcare to people in poorer parts of the world and the second speaker, Young Sohn, President and Chief Strategy Officer at Samsung Electronics, enlarged on that. Samsung, which ships 600 million devices per year, is increasingly looking at connecting all these devices to each other. A reference, of course, to the Internet-of-Things (IoT). This will be highly relevant in delivering personalized, preventive healthcare advice to people.

“Everything we do, everything we touch will have the power of connectivity.”

Young Sohn, @Knowledge For Growth 2015, keynote presentation, May 2015

A big challenge Sohn sees, is that today, data is siloed. And siloed data does not give you many insights. So opening up data and making it more freely available will become increasingly important. Sohn demonstrated this by mentioning a few of the initiatives they support, such as an IoT platform, which enables non-developers to ‘write’ code that interconnects different devices. Many of these applications will also extend beyond healthcare: more data can help, for example, in tackling some of the climate change challenges, such as extreme drought in certain parts of the world.

Droughts and climate change are also high on the agenda of Kemal Malik, responsible for Innovation at Bayer AG, the last of the big companies that still combines pharma, healthcare and crop sciences. The reason: there’s a lot of overlap in the biology of humans and other species. Even the fruit fly shares about 60% of its DNA with humans. Increasingly, learning from different species can generate new insights and new solutions. But to do so, Malik is convinced companies need to collaborate with other parties. To achieve this, Bayer launched several open innovation projects and collaborator spaces where start-ups can work at Bayer offices. The days that big companies can do everything on their own are gone: not all the smart people work for your company and, increasingly, small companies can do more on their own. Many innovations can happen without big funding or investments.

“We can’t get the science right alone, we need partners.”

Kemal Malik, @Knowledge For Growth 2015, keynote presentation, May 2015

The importance of data in research

The three plenary speakers at the morning session all had one message in common: the importance of data in research is growing by the day and embracing the data will be the key driver to solve many of the challenges we face. Not just when it comes to medicines, but also in agriculture, improved research methods can speed up the discovery of solutions. Preventive health, digital health, personalized medicines, … many of these innovations are data driven.

“The data revolution is driving more and more of what we’re doing.”

Peter Piot, @Knowledge For Growth 2015, keynote presentation, May 2015

All speakers also emphasized who’s at the center of all activity: people. And that’s also precisely why we started ONTOFORCE. To help patients. To help people find relevance in an ever-growing amount of data.

That was also the topic of our own workshop. And the topic of PART II of our blog on Knowledge for Growth 2015.