IO INFORMATICS’ KNOWLEDGE EXPLORER 3.6 HELPS RESEARCHERS UNDERSTAND THEIR DATA: EXTENDS ONTOLOGY/ THESAURI MANAGEMENT AND EASE OF USE

BERKELEY, CA - October 25, 2011

Award-winning bioinformatics software provider, IO Informatics, Inc. announces a new release of its flagship product, Knowledge Explorer version 3.6. The highly anticipated product rollout offers what the company believes to be the best in integration technology coupled with one of the most innovative user-interfaces available on the market.

Researchers need to quickly and easily integrate and visualize multiple data sources in context of changing requirements, ontologies and thesauri (vocabularies). The Knowledge Explorer 3.6 is representative of this vision. Enhanced features allow drag-and-drop ontology management and merging. These improvements make it easier for researchers to discover models, signatures and profiles by uncovering actionable meaning from their data.

Dr. Mark Wilkinson, Associate Professor at University of British Columbia and PI Bioinformatics at Providence Heart + Lung Institute, PROOF Centre, Vancouver comments, “The Knowledge Explorer (KE) is focused on making data integration and exploration easy, but this new release takes it a step further. KE now has an improved ability to harmonize and merge disparate datasets through their improved ontology editing features and import-scripting interface. Moreover, it's now easier to communicate ideas to an audience through KE's advances in contextualization - allowing me to place my data in a visual context (e.g. cellular compartments, or a patient-encounter timeline) to improve its rapid comprehension."

The recently extended API to the Sentient Knowledge Explorer allows the community to write Open Source or commercial plug-ins, which can be seamlessly integrated. For instance, resource connections to other tools can be defined via API; the layout can be controlled and queries can be executed.

“Coinciding with this KE release, our lab has created a new release of the SADI plug-in, allowing KE users to click-through from entities on the KE canvas to cross-referencing data and analytical tools offered through the expanding network of SADI-compliant Web Services. The SADI plug-in provides the ability to execute ad hoc analyses directly from the KE canvas," Wilkinson adds.

“Based on feedback from our customers in industry and academia, in this release we have added performance and search functionality for ontology classes. This is particularly useful on extremely large and deeply nested ontology class trees.” said Erich Gombocz, VP and CSO at IO Informatics. “In addition to extending the core functionality, we’ve focused heavily on the user interface, for example, this release provides a larger canvas area to maximize screen space for graph layout and a collection of additional icons to visually distinguish entities better in complex graphs.”

ABOUT IO INFORMATICS

IO is at the forefront of the semantic technology wave. The Company provides software and services for uniquely efficient data integration and transformative knowledge applications in life sciences, biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and medical environments.

For more information visit: http://www.io-informatics.com

CONTACT

Dr. Erich A. Gombocz
CSO / VP
IO Informatics
510-705-8470

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