Several years ago I attended a one-day conference about ontologies, classification systems defining relationships between terms. Speakers shared conceptual developments and declared that Internet and database searching would be revolutionized by the growth of the subject. For the most part, I hadn't seen this transformation happen for everyday researchers until I started reviewing the biomedical database Quetzal. The name comes from the South American bird and is phonetically connected to the parent company name, Quertle. Quetzal is a search interface for several freely available databases in the biomedical sciences, such as PubMed, PubMed Central, TOXLINE, and US Patents. Quetzal applies its own ontology to provide users with more relevant results than they could find otherwise; the goal is to understand the intent of the searcher rather than just completing the query. To this end, Quetzal emphasizes the actions connecting key words and analyzes the author's language to identify these links.
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