Thomson Reuters Awards $10,000 for Most Innovative Use of Web of Knowledge Application Programming Interfaces

-- Winning submission streamlines the scientific discovery process by enhancing the navigability of content within Web of Knowledge

PHILADELPHIA, Nov. 18, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- The IP & Science business of Thomson Reuters, the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, today announced the winner of its Build Challenge, the second phase of a contest designed to expand the discovery experience offered by Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge(SM), the premier research platform for information in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. The competition challenged the research community to develop innovative visualization tools to illustrate the connections found in data, citations and research by using Web of Knowledge application programming interfaces (APIs).

Thomson Reuters recently awarded Balazs Godeny, a software engineer from Hungary, $10,000 USD for submitting the winning prototype of working code and documentation for an application that visually emphasizes the data connections with the Web of Knowledge. The solution allows users to view a set of documents within the Web of Knowledge by searching for specific keywords. It then displays connection points or "nodes" linking to relevant keywords within other documents, creating a visual web to easily show links between research data and to expand the search and discovery process. The winning submission included a workable code for the application and a detailed whitepaper explaining its structure and use. Visit Thomson Reuters ScienceWatch.com to learn more about Godeny's winning submission.

"Since search and discovery is changing at such a rapid pace, I wanted to enhance the way researchers interact with and utilize data," said Balazs Godeny, winner of the Thomson Reuters Build Challenge. "By emphasizing connections in and the significance of research through my application, search and discovery becomes more meaningful and navigable." 

The Build Challenge was the second phase of the Innovation Challenge, a two-part competition, in which Thomson Reuters called upon the research community to develop new and inventive ways for users to interact with the content and tools in the Web of Knowledge. The Ideation Challenge, the first part of the program, attracted over 830 solvers from around the world and received 177 submissions proposing innovative approaches for expanding the discovery experience within the Web of Knowledge. The top 3 winners received monetary prizes. The Build Challenge then tasked the technologists within the scholarly community to develop visual realizations of the data within the Web of Knowledge, the dominant theme of the Ideation Challenge's top submissions. The winning application was chosen from among 15 submissions.

"We are always working to further streamline the search experience," said Gordon Macomber, managing director of Thomson Reuters Scholarly and Scientific Research. "By engaging with expert technologists in the scholarly community, we are able to expand the way users interact with the data in the Web of Knowledge. We congratulate Mr. Godeny on a job well done."

Thomson Reuters partnered with crowdsourcing leader InnoCentive for the Innovation Challenge. "Thomson Reuters is truly a company to be emulated in its use of innovation competitions and crowdsourcing to listen to and engage its customers and users, thereby improving upon and bringing valuable new products and services to market," said Alph Bingham, co-founder and board member of InnoCentive. "We are very excited to have been a part of the Innovation Challenge, and join Thomson Reuters in congratulating Balazs Godeny on creating the winning application." 

Learn more about the Thomson Reuters Innovation Challenge and Web of Knowledge.

InnoCentive 
InnoCentive is the global leader in crowdsourcing innovation problems to the world's smartest people who compete to provide ideas and solutions to important business, social, policy, scientific, and technical challenges. Our global network of millions of problem solvers, proven challenge methodology, and cloud-based technology combine to help our clients transform their economics of innovation through rapid solution delivery and the development of sustainable open innovation programs. For more than a decade, leading organizations such as AARP Foundation, Air Force Research Labs, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cleveland Clinic, Eli Lilly & Company, EMC Corporation, NASA, Nature Publishing Group, Procter & Gamble, Scientific American, Syngenta, The Economist, Thomson Reuters, and several government agencies in the U.S. and Europe have partnered with InnoCentive to rapidly generate innovative new ideas and solve problems faster, more cost effectively, and with less risk than ever before. For more information, go to www.innocentive.com.

Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters is the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. We combine industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial and risk, legal, tax and accounting, intellectual property and science and media markets, powered by the world's most trusted news organization. With headquarters in New York and major operations in London and Eagan, Minnesota, Thomson Reuters employs approximately 60,000 people and operates in over 100 countries. For more information, go to www.thomsonreuters.com.