Kaim Associates announced today that it has released v1.0 of the Kaim Taxonomy Server (KaTS) that enables biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and healthcare organizations to create targeted run-time taxonomies using controlled medical vocabularies such as MeSH, MedDRA, UMLS, SNOMED CT, or proprietary vocabularies.

November 5 2003--The Kaim Taxonomy Server (KaTS) provides enhanced searching of the text of a corporate intranet, website, or file system. KaTS utilizes "spider" technology to extract the complete text of these sources into a text-searchable database. This database enables the creation of a taxonomy of the source files, which enhances searching by enabling users to find all occurrences, not only of any term or phrase in the source files, but also of synonyms and narrower terms. This is accomplished by cross-checking terms from the source files against entries in selected controlled medical vocabularies (CMVs) and extracting those that match into a "targeted" thesaurus.

"The development of the Kaim Taxonomy Server (KaTS) is a natural outgrowth of our core competency, reflecting over two decades of experience in developing medical taxonomies for our pharmaceutical clients to meet specific needs ranging from drug safety monitoring to developing proprietary databases of product literature," said Ed Kaim, President of Kaim Associates, Inc. "With the explosive growth of information on new and developing drugs, new regulatory requirements, and the growing demand for competitive intelligence, the need for an industry-specific taxonomy application to synthesize key content from diverse sources has become a critical factor in IS strategy. KaTS can play a significant role in that strategy by drawing upon a collective repository of close to 3 million industry-specific terms, to create a comprehensive, targeted thesaurus, and to ensure that users in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries will be able to obtain precise results and browse only relevant taxonomy content."

The Kaim Taxonomy Server (KaTS) has been developed using modular components to make it highly configurable and customizable, capable of incorporating locally-developed proprietary vocabularies, integrating with existing search engines, or running as a departmental implementation within pharmaceutical and healthcare organizations that need enhanced search capabilities. The browser-based interface includes both controlled vocabulary and source data selection options. Other key features include the ability to show hit counts, browse the taxonomy for narrower and synonymous terms, and create custom reports showing commonly used synonyms across a company's intranet or within a department.

"Besides the departmental and enterprise-wide scenario, KaTS was designed to be offered as part of Kaim's online hosting services for proprietary databases, whereby a customer could tailor a spidering and mining effort to create a comprehensive database about its products and those of their competitors. In this way, customers would retain KaTS functionality, robust full-text search capabilities, and a full range of online editing and administrative capabilities," said Gene Eames, Kaim's Chief Technology Officer. "By also keeping the Kaim Taxonomy Server (KaTS) flexible, highly customizable and configurable, we've helped ensure that pharmaceutical and healthcare organizations derive maximum benefit from their investment."

For more details, please visit: http://www.kaim.com/site/menu_frame.asp?page=products/kats.htm