About the Company
What We Do
NamesforLife is a privately held U.S. company providing innovative semantic services to the scientific and technical publishing industry.
We offer online services for document annotation and proofing, reviewer recommendations, enhancement, classification, information extraction and terminology management.
Mission
Our mission is to support reproducible science by closing the gap between published literature and data.
History
Namesforlife, LLC is a privately held Michigan based software company that has pioneered semiotic classification methods and semantic annotation technology for the life science, technical and medical literature.
We provide taxonomic and analytical services, data, software and technology licensing for the academic publishing industry, life sciences research, commercial partners and federal laboratories.
Our technology arose from a need to support thesaurus construction, vocabulary integration and ontology development. As a result, we have created bridges between document analytics and important industry standards for knowledge representation.
Our patented technology produces high-quality data sets from scientific, medical and legal literature via its partnerships with the academic publishers, and Fairview Research, LLC.
Technology
NamesforLife was founded to solve a long-standing problem in biology: resolution of the ambiguity between nomenclature and biological objects and concepts. NamesforLife technology, N4L, makes names actionable. In a N4L-enabled document or database, when encountering a name, the user clicks or mouses over it and a menu of authoritative information is displayed: an up-to-date historical record of both the name and taxon in its current and prior states and its synonyms; technical and non-technical papers in which the organism is a key subject; information about its availability from biological resource centers, databases holding molecular sequence data; and reliable information regarding its pathogenicity, utility, and safety requirements are made available.
Exemplars are representations of knowledge about physical entities, and are a novel component of the NamesforLife method. They resolve in real time to current data, related concepts, names and terms in end-user services.
N4L Architecture provides the necessary infrastructure to link end-users to the information they need, when they need it, even when the name or taxonomic concepts may have changed over time. Links from the point of need (e.g., the occurrence of a name in an electronic document) to related data are dynamically maintained in the background. The user has no need to formulate a search query at some external portal. The technology is designed to provide a knowledge-to-knowledge system for the research community and for others seeking to have an organized, reliable and accurate nomenclature and ontology tracking tools.
Through the development of N4L Architecture, NamesforLife provides a completely new approach to bibliographic retrieval, based upon the use of nomenclature as a means of linking to content.