About NLMPlus Semantic Search and Discovery Engine

NLMplus is an award winning semantic search and discovery application, developed by WebLib LLC, a small business in Maryland, in response to a challenge contest by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to make use of NLM’s vast collection of biomedical data and services for the benefit of the Library’s diverse worldwide user communities - view the NLM Show Off Your Apps Awards Ceremony
Contact us at info@weblib.com

NLMplus makes synergistic use of a variety of novel solutions and technologies to maximally utilize NLM’s downloadable data sets, APIs, web services and software tools.

NLMplus provides a new level of universal access to the National Library of Medicine’s rich and high quality content via a simple and an intuitive user interface.

Users will find information on Health Topics (Medlineplus Health Topics); PubMed Reviews (More than 1.6 million PubMed review articles and meta-analyses semantically indexed and searched by WebLib’s Semantic Search and Discovery Engine); Pubmed Abstracts (via semantically enhanced queries sent to NLM’s PubMed search service); NLM Databases (concurrent access to 60 NLM databases via WebLib’s PolyMeta federated search engine); Drugs and Supplements (NLM’s Drug Information Portal and Medlineplus Drugs & Supplements databases); News (Medlineplus News); Videos and Tutorials (Medlineplus Videos and Tutorials) and Images (images from NLM’s History of Medicine and PubChem databases).

NLMplus integrates a number of innovative resources and solutions

The Biomedical Knowledge Base

The NLMplus discovery engine is powered by WebLib’s Biomedical Knowledge Base (BKB) web service to support user exploration and discovery of health concerns, treatments and procedures, drugs and supplements, alternative medicine approaches and other biomedical entities and concepts of interest
The more than four million BKB concepts are automatically generated from trusted biomedical content on the Web, including subsets of NLM’s Pubmed and Medlineplus databases and semantic resources, such as NLM’s Unified Medical Language System and the MeSH Medical Subject Headings Thesaurus
The BKB employs Web Data Mining for the automatic identification and extraction of

Related Concepts
Signs and Symptoms
Tests and Diagnostic Procedures
Disorders
Treatments
Alternative and Complementary Medicine
Genes, biomarkers and other biomedical concepts

The Biomedical Knowledge Base facilitates focused drill-down in the retrieved results and dynamic query modification

Semantic Indexing of the PubMed Reviews database

NLMplus uses the Solr/Lucene open source enterprise search engine with
WebLib’s proprietary semantic indexing technology for the automatic identification of

Key Title phrases
Key Abstract phrases and
MESH Qualifier terms

The key phrases are mapped to UMLS concepts and other concepts in the Biomedical Knowledge Base

Semantic Search

The NLMplus Pubmed Reviews downloaded database is searched using the WebLib semantic search and knowledge engine
The WebLib Semantic Search Engine integrates the Solr/Lucene open source enterprise search engine with WebLib’s Semantic Query Translator and Biomedical Knowledge Base web services
NLMplus searches NLM’s Pubmed Database by sending semantically enhanced Boolean queries directly to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed search service

Federated Search

WebLib’s PolyMeta Distributed Meta-Search and Discovery Engine simultaneously searches 60 NLM databases and on several different NLM search platforms

Applied Natural Language Processing Tools and Applications

WebLib’s proprietary NLP tools
- Part-of-speech Tagger
- Noun Phrase Chunker
- Semantic Parser
- A-Z-Search (Knowledge Search Engine)
- KnowledgeMap (Biomedical Knowledge Base and UMLS semantic annotation web service)
- PolySpell (Scientific and Medical SpellChecker)
- AutoComplete (Query concepts look-ahead display)

Web 2.0-3.0 User Interface Design

accommodates a wide spectrum of diverse NLM user communities, including the public, biomedical researchers, clinicians, health care providers and policy and decision makers
extensive use of AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript) Web 2.0 tools and techniques for optimal performance

The right hand panel of the search results page dynamically displays the first record in each search category
The NLM Databases results page shows the hit counts of the user’s query in 60 NLM databases. The hit count links allow the user to fully exploit the power and functionalities of NLM’s diverse databases and specialized search platforms

Web 3.0 Semantic Web and Semantic Search solutions for increased precision and relevance in search results

The 60 NLM databases accessed by NLMplus

NCBI All Databases (38 databases)
TOXNET (15 databases)
Medlineplus (1 databases, 5 DB subsets)
Drug Information Portal (1 database)
ClinicalTrials.gov (1 database)
Images from the History of Medicine (1 database)
DailyMed (1 database)
AIDSInfo (1 database)
Dirline (1 database)

The NLM APIs, web services and software tools utilized by the NLMplus application include

NLMplus Extensibility and Ongoing Development

NLMplus has a modular architecture and is implemented in Java.
The NLMplus tools and solutions are general in nature and lend themselves to developing semantic search and knowledge discovery solutions in other disciplines and application domains as well.
Examples of ongoing research and development challenges and solutions include expanding the Biomedical Knowledge Base into a Web Knowledge Base, enhancing NLM’s PubMed and Medlineplus databases with Semantic Knowledge Discovery Services, mining Pubmed for Clinically Relevant Information, and developing NLM/NIH Translational Medicine Applications.
WebLib is also pursuing the development of Semantic Web applications with particular emphasis on biomedical information extraction and knowledge discovery, generating Web scale biomedical RDF triple stores for Question Answering and Inferencing, and designing and deploying Knowledge Discovery Services for Clinical Care.

WebLib Semantic Technologies and Solutions

Providing improved access to heterogeneous databases is a common challenge in libraries, businesses, education, research, and a wide variety of other organizations and institutions.
The NLMplus showcase illustrates the spectrum of WebLib’s innovative solutions to provide best-of-class semantic technologies and solutions for diverse customers and application domains.
These solutions include universal search and discovery services, semantic indexing and semantic searching of large content databases, as well as specialized natural language processing and content analysis tools, from scientific and medical spellcheckers to iPhone and Androids apps, and e-book publishing.