The New Look of Nexis by Marydee Ojala, Newsbreaks (Mar 13) -- LexisNexis has released a "new Nexis" (http://www.nexis.com) for business and legal researchers. This is a new "global platform" adopted to standardize the content and look and feel across all markets. The hope is that the new Nexis appeals a broader set of users than the customary information professionals. Migration will take place over the coming year.
Of interest: Nexis employs categorization to aid in discovery, and clustering.
"The new Nexis contains more than 32,000 sources from which customers can pick and choose. What normalizes the content is the categorization—that’s its value-add. Rector is proud that the new Nexis “is designed to help discovery.” It’s not just about doing a search, but discovering things unknown to the searcher. Leveraging LexisNexis SmartIndexing is an important component of this discovery—and normalization—process."
"The new Nexis makes use of clustering technology, which is similar to that employed by Web search engines such as Vivisimo, but it’s less problematic, since it works from controlled vocabulary, rather than algorithms applied to nonindexed Web pages. This clustering is particularly important because it can reveal aspects of a search term the researcher had not considered. It both disambiguates the terms and suggests types of coverage of the topic. Categories include source type, source name, subject, industry, company, geography, or language."