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Digital Science Catalyst Grant Awarded To New Zealand Startup, Simiary

By Alex Jackson September 7, 2016

Grant offered to software company aiming to improve content discovery via intelligent search

Auckland, New Zealand Wednesday 7th September 2016:  Digital Science, a business division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group and a leading global technology incubator focused on jumpstarting innovation in the research community, announced today that early-stage startup Simiary will be awarded a Catalyst Grant of up to $25,000.

The Catalyst Grant is an international initiative to support the innovation of new software tools and technologies for research. The program supports and invests in early stage ideas in the novel use of information technology in research, with an award of up to $25,000 for the most promising ideas to aid science and further education research.

Founded by Ben Adams and Richard Hosking whilst at the University of Auckland, Simiary is a software company that wants to improve scientific content discovery by offering intelligent exploratory search and analysis software.

The majority of scientific knowledge consists of unstructured data built for human consumption, in the form of publications, data abstracts, reports, grant submissions, blog posts, and even email mailing lists. Yet, the massive scale at which this data is generated limits what we can learn from it. The organization of scientific knowledge is stuck in the past. Finding and understanding relevant information from this boundless content is a big problem and current tools are not sophisticated enough.

Simiary’s unique software automatically ingests and resolves these diverse types of unstructured data and thematically contextualizes the related content. This allows their users to discover relevant information quicker, form connections, and make new insights.  Research is increasingly cross­-disciplinary and the ability to discover and synthesize multiple sources of information is now critical for both researchers and policymakers alike. Simiary’s tools are designed to augment this exploratory nature of modern research.

Early examples of Simiary’s capabilities can be found at Frankenplace, an interactive thematic map search engine that uses geographic context as a means to discover, organise, and interactively visualise documents related to a search query.

frankenThe Catalyst Grant will be used to continue software development and to develop working relationships with early adopters, service owners, and end-­user groups.

Ben Adams founder, Simiary says:

“We are thrilled to be awarded the Catalyst Grant from Digital Science, especially as the competition attracted lots of strong applicants. This additional support, which you don’t get from traditional funding sources, makes the Digital Science Catalyst Grant an ideal partner.”

Steve Scott, Director of Portfolio Development at Digital Science adds:

“Simiary is approaching search in a new and exciting way, giving researchers the ability to construct and search across domain-specific relationships within their subject areas. With their intelligent parsing of content, we believe their software will help garner unique insights into new and existing material, especially in an increasingly cross-disciplinary world.”

Simiary joins two other companies who have also been awarded Catalyst Grants.

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