Ariadne said this week that it is partnering with biomedical search engine startup Quertle.
Under the terms of the agreement, Ariadne will provide its MedScan literature-mining technology to Quertle. In exchange, Ariadne will package Quertle's semantic search engine as an appliance solution for its customers.
Quertle uses semantic text analytics to find conceptual relationships in documents and is built upon a database nearly 200 million relationships. The search engine's "Power Terms" represent entire classes of related concepts, such as "proteins," "genes," or "diseases," in order to allow users to build queries that will return the most relevant literature, according to the company.
The free, online search engine draws from PubMed and full-text documents from BioMed Central and PubMed Central.
Ariadne's MedScan retrieves information and data from text, journals, and public datasets and transforms the extracted data into biological relationships that underlie several biological applications, including Ariadne's Pathway Studio software.
Jeffrey Saffer, president of Quertle, said in a statement that the company plans to use MedScan "to refine and present relationships that are highly specific and correlated to the user’s search term."