Customer Service
14 April 2009
U.S. Geological Survey Selects Vivisimo as Search Partner
Velocity to Offer Conceptual Search on National Biological Information Infrastructure’s Website
Pittsburgh, PA — The U.S. Geological Survey has chosen Vivisimo (vivisimo.com), a leading provider of enterprise search software and expertise, to provide its website users data and information from a number of diverse biological data sources.
The award-winning Vivisimo Velocity Search Platform will replace the USGS’ National Biological Information Infrastructure’s (NBII) search solution and provide a single search interface for researchers, decision makers, government agencies, educators, and the public. NBII is a broad, collaborative program to provide increased access to data and information on the nation’s biological resources. The program works with various federal, state, non-profit and educational institutions in support of its overall mission and objectives. Biological search is one key infrastructure component within the overall NBII distributed architecture.
The Velocity implementation will initially search at least 30 diverse data sources—including databases, high-quality scientific websites, biological datasets from around the globe, multi-media/image galleries, and other large-scale federated collections—across multiple agencies and universities. Typical content within these sites ranges from scientific datasets to photographs of biological organisms.
In addition to presenting topical clusters, categories and the spotlighting of key information, Velocity will also enable geospatial display of search results—allowing users to search for certain plants or animals in a specific region or location. USGS will also incorporate Velocity’s new conceptual search to take advantage of its extensive and authoritative Biocomplexity Thesaurus. Conceptual search will enhance the user search experience by presenting suggestions of conceptual terms that may be broader, narrower or similar to those that the user provided in the initial query. This facilitates improved retrieval and accuracy of results and eliminates the need for users to apply the exact terms for querying related concepts.
“The Vivisimo team took the time and effort to understand our requirements and configured a prototype solution that was clearly superior to the other vendors we considered,” Mike Frame of USGS NBII, Director of Research and Technology. “The overall quality of the Vivisimo technical team has been a pleasure to work with and we are excited about the future implementation of search within our NBII program. Our initial release is scheduled for summer of 2009 and we are making significant progress toward that deadline.”
“We’re proud to have USGS join our long list of government clients, including USA.gov, the U.S. Air Force, Military HOMEFRONT, the National Library of Medicine and womenshealth.gov,” said Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO of Vivisimo. “Today’s announcement is a further validation of the innovative approach we’ve brought to search and our government customers.”
About Vivisimo, Inc.
Vivisimo provides enterprises with innovative search solutions that allow end-users to find and take advantage of all appropriate and available information, regardless of source, location or type. Vivisimo’s innovative technology, including social search tools that enable collaboration throughout the enterprise, is delivered with a focus on end-user satisfaction and on application control through easy-to-use interfaces, flexible security management and a modern architecture that enables quick deployment. Vivisimo products are available for standalone search applications or as OEM versions embedded as critical search technology within partner applications and solutions. Vivisimo serves its global clients from headquarters in Pittsburgh, USA, and partners throughout the world. Visit Vivisimo.com and our [Search Done Right™] blog.
