STARLIMS Introduces SDMS Functionalities at PITTCON 2008

STARLIMS Technologies Ltd., a leading provider of laboratory information management systems, or LIMS, today announced that it will introduce a new SDMS module (Scientific Data Management System) at PITTCON 2008 (Morial Convention Center, New Orleans, March 3-6). Integrated into the Company’s web-based LIMS, this integrated module creates a comprehensive platform to manage scientific and laboratory information—consolidating data and documents from the full gamut of laboratory processes.

Unprecedented Integration of Laboratory Data and Scientific Documents
The STARLIMS solution is unique in that it integrates LIMS data and SDMS documents into a single web-based platform. Much of the data created in science-centric organizations is unstructured and not typically managed in a consistent fashion, making it difficult to implement systematic procedures necessary to ensure regulatory and legal compliance. The STARLIMS SDMS module enables organizations to capture, parse, search, manage, share and archive scientific documents. Such documents may include research reports, spreadsheets, product specifications, instrument output files and more. The information extracted from these documents is stored in STARLIMS’s unified platform, and managed with the same control as structured LIMS data has been. In addition, the documents are archived and managed in the same platform as the LIMS data, enabling unified searches and eliminating the inefficiencies of multiple data repositories.

Part of Vision for Enterprise-wide Information Sharing
“The release of STARLIMS SDMS is a crucial step forward in our vision of unifying laboratory, scientific and enterprise information,” said Itschak Friedman, CEO of STARLIMS. “In addition to its obvious streamlining of laboratory informatics, it stands to make a significant contribution to information sharing—and enterprise-wide collaboration.”

Artificial Intelligence for Automatic Content Extraction
What makes the parsing approach of the STARLIMS SDMS unique is its use of artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically extract content from unstructured documents and store it in a structured environment, together with the relevant metadata tags. This process transforms unstructured data into an XML format that is both standardized and highly accessible.

STARLIMS SDMS uses the most recent parsing routine to automatically parse information from any document, even an unidentified document. Any inaccuracies are later adjusted with simple drag-and-drop manipulations and the corrections are integrated into the algorithm in an automatic self-correcting mechanism. The result is a highly effective way of processing any type of document: the laborious task of producing parsing scripts becomes trivial; users need not learn complex parsing applications; and processing times are dramatically accelerated.