Innovative tools to enable exploration of complex and specialised data sets

In the age of Big Data, knowledge workers - individuals, companies and organisations whose primary focus is knowledge
and information extraction and usage - find it increasingly difficult to search for and identify accurate and relevant
information. In particular, in the domain of scientific literature and IP search, where the underlying corpora are growing at a
huge rate, this is a daunting task and human expertise and involvement remain critical. This project aims to develop a suite
of techniques and methods that will enable users to search for and identify relevant information within a corpus more
efficiently and effectively. The methods developed will deploy semantic-based analysis, domain and lexical linguistic
ontologies in order to first understand the user needs based on the underlying domain of application and subsequently
enable more accurate information retrieval through enhanced search and cross-reference of information. In addition, the
project aims to offer advanced user services through sharing of search strategies which will be identified by observing and
understanding patterns in users' search behaviours.

The project represents a highly integrated research proposal that will generate significant impact both for the company and
within the intended application domain, but also more generally within the area of semantic information extraction from
multiple information resources.
Commercial Impact
The project will have direct impact for CambridgeIP and their work in providing efficient and effective services in the area of
scientific search including patent search and analysis. Both partners have significant expertise and experience in the areas
of document and corpora analysis and information extraction, but the combination of skills of CambridgeIP members and
the research expertise and experience of the academic staff from the University of Essex, who are also the leading
members of the ESRC Data Research Centre for Smart Analytics, is envisaged to bring about significant and tangible
outcomes.
More specifically, the project is envisaged to bring about significant improvements to the user services that CambridgeIP
currently delivers, increase the efficiency of the provided services as well as potentially increase their user base
significantly including providing access to SMEs to services and products that were previously accessible only to wellfunded
companies and organisations. At the heart, we do propose to develop methods and techniques which will allow firms to gain access to timely and affordable intelligence about their technological space. Enhanced access to intelligence
will strengthen a firm's R&D strategy and accelerate the commercialisation of inventions which would be dormant
otherwise.
Systems developed in this project will initially be demonstrated in the areas of Bioinformatics and Electronics to start with,
but we envisage extending it to the Automotive, Telecoms and Nanotechology (including Graphene) technology areas.
These are areas where clusters of inventors already exist in the UK and elsewhere. To this end, CambridgeIP's client base
in this space will be direct beneficiaries, but we will also work within the Eastern Academic Research Consortium (Eastern
ARC: this is a research collaboration which involves the Universities of Essex, Kent and East Anglia) and the University of
East Anglia in particular to identify other potential users and beneficiaries.
There will be significant interaction between CambridgeIP staff and University of Essex researchers throughout the project
as well as other practitioners, companies and organisation via the ESRC Data Research Centre for Smart Analytics.
Beyond the impact of the provision of the CambridgeIP services, the developed methods and techniques would be generic
in nature and may be applied to other application areas where information from multiple resources needs to be extracted
and linked (e-commerce, e-government and healthcare applications for instance).
Academic impact
Key academic groups this research will impact on are research groups in Information Retrieval in the Universities of
Sheffield and Glasgow as well as the University of Strathclyde. The University of Essex through the Language and
Computation Group as well as the ESRC Data Research Centre for Smart Analytics have links and relationships with these
research groups and we are planning to disseminate our research results to researchers in these institutions through
dedicated seminars which will provide the opportunity to meet other key academics in this research space. Seminars and
workshops, which will be organised within the ESRC Data Research Centre for Smart Analytics, will provide another means
to ensure academic impact to other key partners, researchers and practitioners. As the techniques developed will also be
more generic they also have the potential to impact on the work carried out by the UK Data Archive which is hosted at the
University of Essex.