The NaCTeM ASSERT Browser is a demonstrator for the ASSERT project funded by JISC to investigate the benefits of text mining and visualisation technology to assist the process of carrying out systematic reviews. Our solution integrates term management, document clustering and associative searching with cluster visualisation and topic map generation tools. Through this modular integration of tools we can provide fast and efficient modelling of the document collections and relationships between the core topics, in an environment where positive cycles of the tools can narrow down even the broadest search to meet the needs of the end user.

This version of the demonstrator uses biomedical journal articles from Medline as the source and has been used to evaluate performance for a systematic review into public health research concerning obesity and diabetes.

This demonstrator covers only the early stages of the ASSERT project. Take a look at the project web page for more information on planned developments, which include more advanced query expansion, interactive content filtering with full audit trail and the addition of summarisation technology.