The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has announced that it is working with MarkLogic Corporation, provider of MarkLogic Server, the Enterprise NoSQL database, to unlock scientific data dating back to the RSC's 1841 origins. To spur innovation in the UK and beyond, the RSC is now making accessible a trove of its information spanning the past 170 years.
This initiative will help ensure Britain's place in world science as articles and educational material - much of which has never been available before - becomes accessible to entrepreneurs, researchers and educators worldwide.
Before working with MarkLogic, the RSC had information stored in many formats which were housed across multiple locations and systems. With the huge growth of data and formats, it had become almost impossible to effectively manage all of its content which includes over one million images, hundreds of thousands of articles from over 200,000 authors and millions of science data files.
MarkLogic and the RSC have brought all of this data into one integrated repository, easily accessible to anyone online. This data model lets MarkLogic easily ingest all types of content, embracing spreadsheet-based or unstructured material such as editorial, comments, pictures, social content and videos.
Each piece of content is automatically tagged, which allows users to discover content quickly and understand the context around it, connecting the dots between different pieces of research, video, journal articles or images.
The RSC has also introduced a host of new applications for children, journals for researchers and made mobile and social an integral part of its platform, all based on MarkLogic's Enterprise NoSQL database.
The new big data platform has also allowed the RSC to publish three times as many journals and four times as many articles as it did in 2006, as well as introducing a variety of new applications aimed at expanding its educational offering and making chemistry more accessible to a wider audience.
