Elsevier MDL and TEMIS provide a unique, innovative chemical information solution

Elsevier MDL, the pioneering company in discovery informatics, and TEMIS, the leading provider of Text Mining enterprise solutions announced today that they have co-developed the Chemical Entity Relationships Skill Cartridge™, a new software application that identifies and extracts chemical information from text documents.

The software identifies chemical compound names, chemical classes and molecular formulae in text documents and translates extracted information into the chemist’s language: the chemical structure.

Powerful features include:

• Classification and relevance weighting: Identified chemical terms are assigned to specific chemical concepts according to semantic categories such as regular chemical name, chemical class name, trivial name, etc.
• Name-to-structure translation: An elaborated name-to-structure translation service enables the user to automatically match textual information with proprietary chemical libraries.
• Unique identification: For each identified structure, a unique fingerprint is provided for de-duplication purposes.

The Chemical Entity Relationships Skill Cartridge™ integrates the Chemical Name Recognition software developed and used by Elsevier MDL to identify chemical names and extract reaction schemes from scientific literature and patents. This Chemical Name Recognition software has proven its robustness and high-quality extraction capabilities for more than two years in the production of the MDL® Patent Chemistry Database backfile. “Within this project, the TEMIS Insight Discoverer™ Extractor engine was used

to derive semantic relations from chemical patents,” said Dr. Doug Hounshell, Vice President of Content Development at Elsevier MDL. “The combination of TEMIS proficiency in linguistic analysis with Elsevier MDL expertise in chemistry has contributed to the success of MDL® Patent Chemistry Database, launched in 2004.”

“The collaboration between Elsevier MDL and TEMIS has already paid off on the production side, and I am very happy that we are now joining forces to bring out a software tool that has been requested by our core customers for some time. Combining Elsevier MDL’s expertise in chemical informatics with TEMIS’ skills in the text mining area has produced an indispensable chemical information extraction solution” said Dr. Michiel Kolman, Managing Director, MDL Information Systems GmbH.

The new Chemical Entity Relationships Skill Cartridge™ greatly extends the TEMIS Skill Cartridge™ Library, which already includes cartridges such as the Biological Entity Relationships Skill Cartridge™ and the Medical Entity Relationships Skill Cartridge™, and thus adds a strategic element to the TEMIS Life Sciences portfolio. Through its Skill Cartridge™ Library, TEMIS supports scientific research projects by addressing issues such as drug-target interactions and drug-drug interactions for safety assessment. The TEMIS information discovery solution, Online Miner™, also leverages the Chemical Entity Relationships Skill Cartridge™ within its Intellectual Property application (IPMiner).

"We are very proud that the successful partnership between Elsevier MDL and TEMIS has resulted in this first joint product development,” said Dr. Günther Kurapkat, Director

Life Sciences, TEMIS. “The new Chemical Entity Relationships Skill Cartridge™ for mining chemical documents offers unique functionality and quality to the market and adds another strategic product to the TEMIS Life Science portfolio, enabling us to provide our customer base with cutting-edge technology developed by the two market leaders in chemistry and text-mining.”

Under the terms of the agreement, TEMIS is the exclusive channel of the Chemical Entity Relationships Skill Cartridge™.