UK Department of Trade & Industry - iBio Video Case Study

Biotechnology is one of the UK's fastest growing industries, and the UK is second only to America as a leading force in this field. Obviously the public sector plays an enormous part in directing, regulating and funding this work. Endorsed by the Office of the E-Envoy, the UK's Department of Trade and Industry commissioned a cross-governmental project team tasked with creating an 'Information Biotechnology' portal to act as a single, reliable source of all UK biotechnology public information and research. This project secured funding from the Treasury's Invest-To-Save-Budget, a programme created to support innovative, leading edge initiatives that are firmly based on partnership working, and which in turn reduce organizational barriers, promoting joined up working, and streamline the move towards seamless service across government. But there was a significant challenge: at the same time as creating joined-up government, I.T. budgets were being cut and resource to undertake the project was growing scarce.

The DTI iBio team chose Autonomy to automatically aggregate all the disparate information and step around the barriers within government departments to draw together material without having to impinge on the technology within the individual departments. Autonomy's software analyzes patterns and identifies the concepts within information, whatever its format, rather than just searching for keywords. It gains an understanding of the context and meaning of information, allowing it to act upon information in highly complex ways. While keyword dependent technologies are manually intensive to maintain, and provide inaccurate results, Autonomy's unique ability to understand concepts delivers highly accurate, relevant results to users automatically and in real time.

http://www.i-bio.gov.uk/