PISCES combines the advantages of traditional relevancy ranking algorithms with a proprietary algorithm for ranking based on word proximity as well as standard Boolean operations. It is used with unstructured textual data in addition to highly structured data such as XML-encoded documents and MARC records. PISCES searches multiple databases in any combination, yielding combined ranked result lists. It consists of a library of search and retrieval subroutines which may be combined to produce .NET as well as stand-alone retrieval systems.

Turn to PISCES to improve access to information using powerful relevance-ranking capabilities, advanced search features, and simple ways to filter search results by category or FAQs. For more information regarding PISCES, please visit our PISCES history page at the following link.

PISCES History

The PISCES Search Algorithm

PISCES ranks information based upon three factors: the number of unique query terms in a document, automatic term weighting based on a standard term frequency - inverse document frequency (TfIdf) algorithm, and proximity weighting. These three factors can be weighted in their effect on the final ranking. A retrieval language is used where reserved words are preceded by an 'at' (@) sign. For more technical information, visit http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/pisces/.

Clients Profiles

The Library of Congress’ Congressional Research Service helps analysts find similar bills and compare legislation (bills). PISCES combines to offer a powerful similary search tool with a document comparator!

Childrenslit.com (www.childrenslit.com), the Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database (CLCD), offers a database designed to help organizations and individuals find and share information about children’s books and educational software products.

Paratext ™ (www.paratext.com) offers a suite of bibliographic database websites that serve hundreds of leading libraries.

PISCES is also used to support a robust search interface for a large collection of toxicology databases from the National Library of Medicine. National Library of Medicine's Toxnet and (DirLine: A Directory of Health Organizations. NLM). PISCES is able to consolidate volumes of data across various databases into a simple, powerful, high performance search service. Visit NLM for examples of this work: National Library of Medicine's Toxnet and DirLine: A Directory of Health Organizations.

Neogen Corporation, a developer, manufacturer and distributor of products dedicated to food and animal safety, www.neogen.com, also deployed PISCES to index its website. .

For more technical information, visit http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/pisces/.

For examples of our work, please check out our client sites: National Library of Medicine's Toxnet,
DirLine: A Directory of Health Organizations, and
Children's Literature DB.