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.

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 similiary 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.