Two days ago we at Metaome launched DISTiL, a beta version of our semantic search engine for the life sciences. 48 hours, 414 visitors and 425 queries later we feel reasonably pleased.
Ram and I, the founders at Metaome, had both worked with scientific data for several years and were much too familiar with all the issues brought about by the lack of data interoperability. Data integration was always large in our minds. As the number of databases grew rapidly, it also became clear that one could ask really cool questions, if only these data sources could talk to each other. Wouldn’t it be nice to “distil the essence”? Thus the inspiration for DISTiL.
What is DISTiL? For starters it is a rather awkwardly coined acronym (Data Integration using Semantic Technologies in the Life Sciences). If there exists ”A Golden Rule Book for Acronyms” we have probably broken every rule in it!
What can you do with DISTiL? We have a cool query interface and you can ask a really large and convoluted question and build a fancy visual graph in the process. Our engine will hop, skip and jump across all the data sets and find what you want. You can filter the results to hone into what you want. Needles to say you can also do a simple search by typing in a single word like “Aspirin”, we just like to talk about the cool stuff first.
What kind of questions can you ask? You could explore host-pathogen protein-protein interactions, look at common targets between two drugs and a whole lot more! Check out our sample queries. If you have a good use case do consider sharing with us.
Watch this space for more…
