Briefs

Parmenides - a new software system that enables faster and more comprehensive analysis of vast quantities of information is so effective that it not only creates order out of chaos and allows computers to perform tasks that before only people could perform, it is also creating new information from old data.

Three major case studies were used to evaluate and demonstrate the system. One market-consulting firm for the biotech industry used it to query situations-vacant advertising and business information newswires to predict what new drugs and compounds individual companies wanted to develop. It's creating highly value-added analyses from public domain information.

The Greek Ministry of Defence (MoD) used the developed tools to automatically compile dossiers on terrorist groups from a combination of its own files and newspaper reports. Meanwhile, the Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever is using them to analyse journal articles, newspaper reports and even anecdotal data to build up a picture of the relationship between weight, health and food. It's a bit like automatically producing a super-study of diseases and how they spread.

Our greatest contribution was to create a framework for integrating structured and unstructured information," says Dr Babis Theodoulidis, Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester's Institute of Science and Technology and coordinator of the IST-funded Parmenides project behind these tools.

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