Conference Order Form (online) Conference Order Form (PDF) Admin and Hotel Details Exhibitor Information   THIS YEAR'S SPONSORS Conference Wallets   Conference WiFi   Sunday Reception Cocktail   Conference welcome Dinner   Conference Welcome Dinner   Conference Cocktail   Conference Cocktail   Buses to Marineland   Pre-Dinner Cocktail   Conference Dinner   Conference Dinner   Conference Dinner Décor THIS YEAR'S EXHIBITORS Aureus Pharma BizInt Solutions British Library CambridgeSoft CAS/STN ChemAxon Decript Domex E-Data EBSCO Elsevier European Patent Office InfoChem Intellixir Landon IP Lexis-Nexis Linguamatics Minesoft Parthys Reverse Informatics Questel QWAM Content Intelligence ScioSphere Search Technology TEMIS Thomson Reuters Wiley-Blackwell     View 2008 hotel booking View Programme Committee and Strategic Advisory Board members To record your interest and to be on our email update list for this and future meetings   your interest                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Conference Order Form (online) Conference Order Form (PDF)      Admin and Hotel Details     View 2008 hotel booking View Programme Committee and Strategic Advisory Board members To record your interest and to be on our email update list for this and future meetings   your interest		ICIC The International Conference on Trends for Scientific Information Professionals Nice 19-22 October 2008 This page last updated 07 October 2008. Programme contents as of this date The ICIC meeting covers trends in the field of scientific and professional information. The 2008 meeting programme has an impressive line-up of significant figures in the information world. Among the topics covered and discussed by the 20+ speakers are: tools for intelligence and decision support, including mining chemical and biological data, visualisation, information and entity extraction the new patent landscape, text and structure searching search engines and data integration intranets in knowledge management new information business models ... PROGRAMME   Sunday 19 October 2008   Conference Wallets Sponsored by Evolvus Conference WiFi Sponsored by Molecular Connections 19.15 Welcome Cocktail sponsored by FIZ CHEMIE Berlin 20:00 Welcome Dinner part-sponsored by Elsevier and LexisNexis After-Dinner Drink provided by Elsevier / Reaxys   Monday 20 October 2008   08.45 Day One Opening Keynote Carl Horton Chief IP Counsel, GE IP Strategy and  Challenges for Patent Protection  in the New World Economic Context Stephen Leicht Collexis, South Carolina, USA Web 2.0 and the Future of Competitive Intelligence - Text Analytics, Portfolio Analysis, and the Real-Time Value of Digitised Content Digitised content, ubiquitous data access and information overload are hallmarks of the Web 1.0 revolution of the 1990s. As the information on a company, an industry and the competitive landscape became digitised, new media of relevant content also emerged – company websites, FAQs, blogs, online journals, social networks and other new media. The combination of overwhelming digitised information with new content has offered possibilities and challenges for competitive intelligence. While Wall Street has historically been guided by the numbers, more defining information in brand messaging, consumer feedback, online reviews, company reports, patent applications and other less structured content can alter future performance. At the same time, innovations in text analytics have allowed for robust data mining from unstructured heterogeneous sources.   This presentation overviews how these innovations in text analytics combined with the explosion in unstructured text sources create unique opportunities to monitor, categorise, trend, track, visualise -- and even predict -- competitive landscapes in a Web 2.0 world. This transition is a frightening change for stodgy business, but creates opportunities for savvy data miners and iterative, flexible, entrepreneurs. Product News: Thomson Reuters / Elsevier / Questel Günter Stiegler BASF, Germany Inroads into the Information Jungle – Intelligent R&D Information Systems Traditional information and lab data management systems are designed for documentation and operational needs or commercial aspects of external information providers. The result is a wide variety of silo applications with different content, functionalities and technologies. In the R&D process, using information from different sources in the right context is necessary, which requires intelligent searches in truly integrated systems.   This presentation sheds light on the limitations and disadvantages of current solutions and presents the architecture of a novel system that is based on search engines und portal technology.  break & exhibition 10.50-11.20 Francisco Webber Matrixware, Austria Cultivating the Corpus and Growing the Tools – Systemic Strategies for Facing Reality in Professional Information Retrieval Most of the current IR (Information Retrieval) research efforts point towards its application in the consumer domain, where the requirements tend to focus on broadness rather than depth. By contrast, professional IR needs maximum precision, recall AND efficiency. The experimental investigation and the practical evaluation of existing methodologies has shown that there is little probability of finding a single algorithm that will satisfy all the needs of professional patent searchers. Hence, there is a need for a variety of different Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to be applied on the global patent corpus in order to significantly improve patent retrieval.    Recursively generating metadata from data and metadata from metadata, the various refinement processes let the information store grow and allow the user community to actively "Cultivate the Corpus". The main limiting factor in this endeavor is the sheer size of the data. Like most real world collections, the patent collection is of exceptional size. More than 60 million large documents containing a vocabulary of > billion distinct terms lead to a repository size much larger than 100 terabytes after generating NLP metadata. To keep processing time reasonable, a special discipline of HPC (High Performance Computing) techniques has emerged: Semantic Super Computing (SSC). In SSC the traditional parallelisation of tasks is extended by the field of reconfigurable computing by the use of algorithmically generated processor architectures, explicitly designed and tuned for NLP purposes. The solution to the professional IR case seems to be more like a critical path to take than a single scientific formalism. As for many complex systems, evolution seems to be the most effective way for progress. The IRF (Information Retrieval Facility) therefore created and maintains an infrastructure of information and technology as "ecological environment" involving all relevant parties: patent information professionals, information scientists and IT experts. Together they created an extensible software infrastructure, the "Leonardo" Ecosystem, in an agile development process.   Within this framework, technologists can simultaneously create and refine new tools and use the community channel to communicate with their end-users. The benefit for the end-users on the other side is a closer match between the tools for their actual information needs and existing workflows. This feedback mechanism corresponds to the "Matrixware Innovation Cycle".   The IRF and its annual convention in Vienna, the IRFS (IRF Symposium), are trying to shape the understanding and to sketch possible solutions for the real world professional context of patent retrieval. Product News: CAS / Lexis-Nexis / BizInt Solutions Peter Vanderheyden LexisNexis, Ohio, USA Latent Semantic Searching vs Boolean Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a powerful information retrieval tool that provides searchers with an effective way to locate and semantically rank related documents while overcoming the search problems associated with synonymy and polysemy. While advanced searchers still rely heavily on Boolean searching because of its high precision, the quality of Boolean searching is dependent on the searcher’s experience level, knowledge of the content set and search engine, and ability to enter all relevant keywords as part of their search. Since various unknown keywords can be used to describe a concept, Boolean searching may result in reduced recall. Although LSA is limited in its ability to improve precision, it can dramatically improve recall, finding documents that Boolean searches may miss by analyzing document sets and terms to reveal concepts especially when document sets span varied or noisy texts or contain multiple languages. This presentation will outline the pros, cons and synergy between Boolean and LSA and discuss the value of LSA for the information professional. lunch & exhibition. 12.40-14.15 Maik Annies Syngenta, Switzerland Chemical Non-Patent Literature Searching in E-journals and on the Internet Searching non-patent literature prior art is crucial for checking patentability of new inventions and validity of granted patents, since by patent law information contained in non-patent literature is as important as any patent document. Relevant subject matter is not always in focus of a publication, but often hidden in the text, and therefore not always indexed in bibliographic databases of classical online hosts. Thus, comprehensive information retrieval requires searching the full-text of journals and the internet. In this context retrieval of chemical structures from these sources is a major challenge.    The presentation gives an overview of the potential and drawbacks of various publisher E-journal full-text search sites with special respect to their search and display capabilities in chemical searching. Moreover, recent developments in chemical structure searching in E-journals and on the internet will be discussed. Product News: Minesoft / TEMIS / EPO Sophia Ananiadou University of Manchester, UK Text Mining Techniques for Linking Text to Pathways Text mining techniques may be used to link biological knowledge with scientific literature. This presentation reports on recent work by the National Centre for Text Mining to link text to pathways. Pathway construction relies mostly on literature, since the most important discoveries are reported in scientific articles, and the full context of each discovery is described in the papers reporting it. However, the rapidly growing amount of literature makes it difficult to identify relevant new discoveries and update the pathways. We report on the text mining techniques we have used to enrich and populate pathway models with evidence from text. This has been realised through the construction of semantically enriched corpora containing biological events and pathways. The text mining systems used for this work are: MEDIE, FACTA and KLEIO (www.nactem.ac.uk). These rely on many databases and other enabling technologies like the Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML), Graphical Notation (SBGN) and the Cell Designer program. Ann Perry Unilever, UK Getting the Full Picture: Identifying Partners for Open Innovation by Combining Information Sources via Mining and Visualisation Tools In recent years Open Innovation has become increasingly important as a way to approach business, and R&D in particular. Organisations big and small no longer assume that the answers to R&D challenges can be generated internally. It is therefore increasingly important to find the right partner to collaborate with - not just any partner - which often means a combination of technical capability and commercial viability.   There is plenty of evidence that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are increasing in importance in the innovation space. But finding the right SME presents significant challenges because there is typically a large number of them, each with a relatively small "footprint".   As one way to meet this challenge, the Technology Intelligence group at Unilever has developed techniques that draw together information from multiple sources. We then use information analysis and visualisation tools to identify partners that have both a technical footprint (e.g. patents) and commercial footprint (e.g. trade and business news), using this as an indicator of promising companies. We work closely with the R&D teams to refine the lists generated to deliver a shortlist of leads to follow up. Product News: Domex E-Data / Search Technology / Wiley-Blackwell break & exhibition 16.20-16.50 Kay H. Melvin US Patent & Trademark Office, USA The Changing World of Search and Information Access at the USPTO Effective access to Intellectual Property (IP) information is a key component of the USPTO's mission. By disseminating this information through its public search systems and data products, the USPTO provides the public the means to foster the competent preparation of patent and trademarks applications, avoid infringement of patents and trademarks, and understand the current state of the art as a basis for new ideas. This interactive presentation will focus on the new and innovative approaches being explored by the USPTO to more effectively provide access to the USPTO's extensive body of scientific knowledge. Current projects that will support the modernisation of internal USPTO automation systems to enhance text and search-related capabilities will be discussed. The interactive portion of this presentation will focus on a topic of key interest to the USPTO: improving automated access to the USPTO's systems, so that patent information can be delivered to all users, including 'automated' / data mining users, in an efficient manner. The presentation will engage the audience in a discussion on key data dissemination issues and ideas on approaches to improve the electronic access and delivery of information to the business and research communities. John Bambridge European Patent Office, The Netherlands Technology Development, Automation and Innovation at the European Patent Office The EPO manages one of the world's most comprehensive collections of technical documentation, accessed daily by thousands of internal and external users through electronic tools developed to support the patent granting process. Guiding the further evolution of these services to a full electronic end-to-end granting process for the benefit of all users is a major challenge in the strategic objectives of the EPO. At the same time, the growth in international data exchange and handling of the increasing amount of patent-related documentation, particularly from Asia, needs to be addressed so as to ensure that user expectations are met with efficient tools.   This presentation looks at the strategic issues in maintaining the value of the patent system by outlining the key principles that underlie the development of the EPO's documentation databases. Emphasis will be given to recent development in the translation and searching of CN, KR and JP patents and utility models as well as the importance of acquisition and quality policies when extending the range of available patent and non-patent literature. The recent developments in the search engine and associated examiner tools specifically developed for the search and examination work will also be addressed. 18.30 Conference Mixer Cocktail sponsored by Questel and Matrixware (Hotel Park)   Tuesday 21 October 2008   08.45 Bruno van Pottelsberghe Université Libre de Bruxelles, ECARES, Bruegel -- Solvay SA Chair of Technological Innovation From Gutenberg to Blackberry : On the Economic Role of Quality in Patent Systems The patent is a policy tool aiming at stimulating innovation. This presentation first explains the economic role of patent systems and their importance in innovation systems. In this respect the design of patent systems is a key issue. A particular focus will be put on the quality and cost factors through historic and recent cases as well as with simulations. The presentation is inspired by recent research and the book authored by Guellec and van Pottelsberghe (2007), “The economics of the European patent system”, Oxford University Press, which calls for a more ‘economic’ approach in the design of patent systems. Martin Griffies Ariadne Genomics, USA Using Automated Corpus Visualisation and Summarisation to Improve Literature and Reference Comprehension A significant proportion of scientists’ and information specialists’ time is spent reading, annotating and in the analysis of information sources, ranging from news feeds to patents to full-text scientific literature. Understanding all the implications of a corpus is a challenge which can be tackled by using tools which combine text processing, entity extraction, automatic recognition of correlations between those entities, and graphics. Visualisations of text corpora using techniques such as entity and relationship (fact) frequency tables, Venn diagrams, heat maps and computer-generated networks, pathways or spidergrams make comprehension easier and will save time. Graphic analysis of large text corpora is perhaps the only way to perform this task effectively, ascribing authority and reliability to automatically extracted relationships from multiple sources.   Automatically generated pathways are a particularly useful technique for combining information gained from several sources in order to generate new knowledge, whether in competitive intelligence or research. The balances between stringent and relaxed entity extraction, or between full retrieval and complete relevance can be tuned to give appropriate levels of information depending upon software solutions chosen, the application area and the demands of the users. Product News: EBSCO / InfoChem / QWAM Luca Toldo and Caroline Kant-Mareda* Merck KGaA, Germany and *Merck Serono International, S.A, Switzerland Applying Text-Mining to Support Drug Discovery: A Pharma Case Study The ever increasing amount of  available scientific literature sparks new approaches for knowledge extraction. At Merck Serono, we are using state-of-the-art use text mining technology to discover "hidden" / new links between biomedically relevant entities. In this way we try to validate new scientific hypothesis to add value to our molecules in the pipeline. In this presentation we show our latest experiences, exemplified by a well validated case study. break & exhibition. 10.30-11.00 Anton Heijs Treparel Information Solutions, The Netherlands Applications of Text Mining and Advanced Visualisation Techniques Text mining is now being used more in patent and non-patent literature search, especially to analyse large complex data sets rapidly. The supervised approach – classification – and the unsupervised approach – clustering and projection techniques – are both popular in text mining and together provide strong instruments for various tasks. Text mining in combination with advanced visualisation are two important techniques in patent analytics. This presentation presents the work of Treparel undertaken together with Philips on the combined usage of classification and clustering and different advanced visualisation techniques. The technical principles and the business case of some applications of text mining and visualisation will be presented and discussed. Product News: Aureus Pharma / CambridgeSoft / Linguamatics Christopher Southan EMBL, UK Complementarity Between Public and Commercial Databases of Bioactive Compounds: Extending the Linkage Between Chemistry and Biology The last few years have seen a revolution in open cheminformatics as exemplified by the growth of PubChem, DrugBank and other databases. Consequently, medicinal chemists and biologists now have access to high utility public sources of bioactive compounds that they can not only download and/or query directly over the Web but that also link to structured bioinformatic data. This work (PubMed ID 17897036) reviews compound content comparisons between selected public and commercial databases, particularly those that specify relationships between compounds and their activity against primary protein targets, thereby linking chemistry to biology. After collecting 19 different commercial and public data sources, including selected bioactive sub-sets, stringent filtering for unique content was applied to facilitate standardised comparison of content. The resultant 19x19 matrix shows the pair-wise comparison of each set of compounds. Detailed results will be presented but overall they emphasise the complementaritity of combining sources. This conclusion is supported by a Venn-type analysis of GVKBIO, WOMBAT (both commercial) and PubChem (public). These compound databases show not only overlap but also unique content and types of molecular target bioinformatic connectivity in each case because of their different strategies for source selection and expert curation. Anton Fliri Pfizer, USA Development of Technology for Transforming Analysis of Patent Information The immense pressure to improve drug discovery in recent years has led to changes impacting on strategies for protecting intellectual property -based investments in a number of ways. Thus, the pressure of bringing drug candidates ever more rapidly to the market has lead to a significant increase in the risk of loosing investments in patent litigation. Unrecognizsd by most, the requirement of submitting prior art deemed material to patentability to patent examiners and to specifically point out the novelty and non obviousness of a claimed invention threatens to reverse the long-established presumption of patentability given to a patent application and exposes corporations to a substantially greater risk of patent litigation. Keeping in mind that there are ~ 150 000 chemical patent application filed each year in the US alone and that the quality of patent searches between applications varies widely, the issue of patent validity is becoming one of the key problems of current patent systems. Considering that Pfizer creates intellectual property in multiple phases of the R&D process, the company initiated about five years ago efforts for developing technology that could assist in protecting its R&D based investments. Since most of Pfizer’s investments involve to some extent, patents relating to utilities of chemical structures, proteins, DNA or RNA sequences, one primary goal of this initiative was improving the accuracy and speed of the analysis of patent claim information. Herein we describe the development of technology that assists scientists with understanding what is actually claimed in a competitor’s patent. The outcome of this analysis is of strategic importance because it determines the risk of losing an investment in patent litigation. lunch & exhibition 12.40-14.30 The Information Community Panel : The Next Five Years An interactive panel, animated by Randall Marcinko that unites an expert panel with the audience for comments and analysis concerning challenges for information users and producers over the next five years. Expert panelists include Fabienne Berthet (IPSEN), Tim Hamer (Thomson Reuters), Peter Kallas (BASF) and Stephen Leicht (Collexis). Product News: ScioSphere / Parthys Reverse Informatics / Intellixir break & exhibition 16.05-16.30 Steven Hajkowski Thomson Reuters, UK Comparing and Combining Searches Obtained from First-Level and Value-Add Patent Data Patent data can be searched either from a collection of first-level original patent datasets from the issuing authorities, or from single sources of value-add data from the commercial information providers. In terms of the results obtained, each has its own advantages, for example the first-level data can provide the most comprehensive text-based searching, whereas the value-add databases offer abstracts in English for many more countries, plus advanced indexing to aid retrieval. In addition, combining and de-duplication of results from the various sources can be difficult, and the differing methods of calculating patent family relationships can bring further complications. This presentation examines a case study demonstrating these issues, comparing a search from first-level and value-add patent sources. Options for combining and de-duplicating the results are then discussed, as are the possibilities for creating answer sets compiled according to INPADOC and invention-based patent families. Product News: British Library / Landon IP / Decript Irene Schellner European Patent Office, Austria Patent Information from East Asia - Advantages of Searching in Original Language Databases Currently, more than half of all new patent applications published in the world are written in Japanese, Chinese or Korean. Japan, China and Korea are all among the top five biggest patenting nations in the world. Every year, the Japanese Patent Office receives some 400,000 patent applications, the majority of which are filed by domestic applicants. In the last ten years, applications from domestic applicants doubled in Korea, and increased more than eight-fold in China. A considerable part of the prior art thus generated in East Asia will stay at a national level and not be published elsewhere in the world in a western language.    The above illustrates that patent documentation from East Asia has become indispensable. The patent information user faces the challenge of dealing with a large number of prior art documents that are -- in many cases -- neither readable nor fully searchable in English. Those relying entirely on English-language coverage, limit themselves to searching in abstracts and bibliographic information, often missing out on utility models altogether and facing a serious time delay of several weeks or months until English information becomes available. This presentation looks at possible risks when searching only in English information and points out ways for users of patent information from East Asia to overcome the language barrier and search East Asian patent data more efficiently. 19.00 (departure) Conference Dinner at Marineland Buses Sponsored by BizInt Solutions Conference Dinner Welcoming Cocktail Sponsored by Chemical Abstracts Service Conference Dinner Sponsored by Thomson Reuters and Prous Science Conference Dinner Flowers and Décor Sponsored by Minesoft   Wednesday 22 October 2008   09:00 William Town Molecular Connections, India XTractor - A System for Regular Pubmed Abstracts Alerts along with Manually Annotated Sentences Mining PUBMED to retrieve accurate hits or extract relations has always been a long-standing problem in biology. It becomes a highly impossible task to identify the right gene name or the right disease term and extract relations at all times. This problem has been addressed numerous times by many NLP engines and also many solutions have been suggested.   To circumvent this problem we have come out with a text mining service model called XTractor. XTractor is highly accurate and more efficient than many of NLP engines, since we use hybrid technology of semi-automated data mining, which means the process involves NLP mining followed by a layer of manual validation. So we end up getting the most accurate hits for genes, diseases, drugs and many more entities. Since the annotation is accurate we would also be able to perform complex queries and retrieve the most complex relations in PUBMED, which is currently not possible with the conventional NLP systems. We have been able to achieve up to 99% accuracy in term pickups and relationship extraction with the XTractor system. A few advantages of the XTractor system are as follows: XTRactor acts as an alert service and keeps you up-to-date with the latest publications, as and when it gets published at PUBMED for your choice of Keywords. Sentences are manually validated and classified into categories such as Biomarker-Disease, Drug- Gene, Gene- Process and many other relevant categories. So searching PUBMED and extracting relationships becomes simpler and more effective. With XTractor, the entities/terms in the sentences are manually categorised to public biological ontologies and it also provides users with the ability to create their own databases of sentences and relations for their sets of Keywords. XTractor also provides the user with ability to change Keywords preferences from time to time. Peter Nissen JBoye, Denmark Emerging issues with corporate intranets: options, opportunities and current issues Ensuring that your intranet delivers business value requires the right mix of content, form, technology and strategy. This presentation takes a critical view at emerging trends within the intranet sphere, at trends which are -- or should be -- dying and at evergreens.    Some of the issues discussed are: What does it take to run a good wiki? How should you deal with intranet news and personalisation? Is MOSS 2007 the answer to your dreams? How should you organise to increase your chances of making your intranet a success?    This presentation also takes a look at some of specific issues related to running intranets in the pharmaceutical industry, innovative approaches and mission critical knowledge management tools as seen in the context of the wider online media trends. Jane List The Technology Partnership plc, UK An A to Z of Patent Citation Searching Using citations can be a convenient method for expanding searches in patent and scientific literature and this technique is well known. Cited references and citing references can add hits backwards in time, forwards in time and also laterally. In a patent search citations can provide new approaches for the search, new search terms and new potential applications. This presentation looks at the different types of patent citations, what they mean and how they can add insight for searching. Examples of patent searches such as competitor patent monitoring, prior art and invalidity searching may be used to explore the strengths and weaknesses of using A, X, Y and examiner citations. Patent citations from patent offices around the world are indexed by several vendors and also by patent office and other independent search engines for the benefit of patent information searchers. The approaches to citations taken on databases such as Patbase, DPCI and esp@cenet are reviewed for different searches. To finish, we take a look at graphic visualisations of patent citations. How useful are patent citation trees in gaining deeper understanding of the patent landscape? Simon Gittins Vivisimo, UK Finding Meaningful Competitive Intelligence through Enterprise Search According to leading technology analyst firm Forrester Research, the top concern of market and competitive intelligence professionals is "a wellspring of competitive and market insight that goes untapped." Researchers, scientists and marketers are all struggling with the best way to understand their own products' competitive weaknesses and strengths, knowing when competitors will announce their next product or upgrade and whether their product line will soon be imitated by a lower cost offering. Imagine being able to search instantly across multiple data repositories to learn more about your market in order to ward off outside threats and competition. The ability to find and digest information easily such as what patents your competitors are applying for or what new compounds might be on the horizon could be invaluable to an organization. The reality today is that organizations are doing this by leveraging the power of enterprise search.    This presentation describes enterprise search and provides several real-world use cases of organisations – particularly in the pharmaceutical industry – that use search today for competitive intelligence as well as for boosting employee productivity. It also touches upon the social aspects of search and demonstrates how companies are enabling collaboration through this tool. Erik Nemeth Getty Research Institute, California, USA The Future of Searching for Scholarly Literature: Discipline-specific Research Databases in Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web Both generalised web search engines and discipline-specific bibliographic databases will need to evolve to remain competitive — comprehensive and authoritative — in discovery of scholarly literature. Initiatives such as Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic-live Search, acknowledge the importance of specialisation in searching for scholarly literature, and rising expectations of comprehensive access require that discipline-specific databases increase coverage. In parallel, cross-disciplinary pursuits such as neuroaesthetics — neuroscience and art history — increase the need for an integrated search of specialised databases. By following models of open collaboration in Web 2.0 and applying thesauri in the ontology of the Semantic Web, producers of discipline-specific databases can apply existing knowledge bases not only to expand coverage and maximise discovery of scholarly literature but also to foster interdisciplinarity. A strategy for leveraging primary assets of a specialised database — discipline-specific partnerships, expert abstracts and indexing, and discipline-specific thesauri — serves as a case study. The strategy illuminates the potential for integrating a discipline-specific database in the humanities with datasets from the sciences through the evolving infrastructure of the Web. break & exhibition 11.00-11.30 Richard Kidd Royal Society of Chemistry, UK Prospecting for Chemistry in Publishing The RSC's Project Prospect, which was the first application of semantic web technologies to primary research publishing, won the 2007 ALPSP/Charlesworth Award for Publishing Innovation. The application of open and standard identifiers for both compounds and subject matter has opened new possibilities for linking between related publications and data, which promise to transform the way published chemistry is handled in the next few years. The role of a publisher, between author and reader, offers particular advantages and challenges - to preserve more of the original lab science throughout the publication process while delivering the science in ways that aid discovery and re-use. This presentation discusses the problems with the conventional publication process which we tried to address, the development process, and successes and failures in applying new standards. We look at the InChI and identifying chemical entities, using existing ontologies and building new ones, and their real-life application. While new developments applied to RSC's book and journal portfolio will be highlighted, the application of the underlying technologies can be seen to offer real benefits for both standalone and web-wide chemical information applications. René Deplanque FIZ CHEMIE Berlin, Germany Full Text Searches in E-books. Crossing the Borders of Publishing Houses During the last years major publishing houses have started to publish electronic books which they are offering within their search systems. Normally, using the search engine of a publishing house, the user can search the content of a publishing house, full text or within defined metadata and then download hits as a PDF file, in conformity with licence agreements. Unfortunately, this is a time consuming and tedious procedure, because searching the total content of a publishing house will retrieve all possible hits, whether in eBooks or journals, and independent of the actual licence agreement. Therefore it is complex to pinpoint exactly the desired answer in a licensed eBook. Another problem users are facing is that libraries have licences with many publishing houses. In addition, for obvious reasons, publishing houses do not allow cross-publishing-house-searching. This greatly hinders the use of eBooks and therefore the development of this new and important market. This presentation discusses implementing a licence-dependent full text cross publishing house search engine. It shows users the highest ranked hits relating to their searches and licence agreements, independent of the publishing house. A prototype is presented which already contains more than 10,000 of the latest eBooks from three major scientific publishers. The search engine is updated daily. First experiences by university librarians, consortia and industry will be discussed. Sasha Gurke Knovel, New York, USA Usage Analysis with COUNTER: Pros and Cons of the Code of Practice for Electronic Non-Periodicals Six COUNTER reports are analyzed for e-books in general and technical reference works in particular to ascertain the value derived from each report by subscribers of online services. Some of the reports provide skewed statistics and are not very useful for aggregated STM e-references, however COUNTER compliance is frequently a requirement and certainly desired by the subscribers.   COUNTER statistics favour comprehensiveness over relevancy in search and retrieval. Relevancy is most important for e-references, whereas it is comprehensiveness for periodicals, leaving the former at a disadvantage. Several changes to the COUNTER Code of Practice are proposed to correct this bias. One proposal involves separate reports for e-books, databases and interactive e-books and online tools. End of 2008 meeting at approximately 13.00 The 2009 ICIC meeting will take place in Sitges (Barcelona). Dates are 18-21 October 2009 View Programme Committee and Strategic Advisory Board members To record your interest and to be on our email update list for this and future meetings   your interest