The IP & Science business of Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, today announced the launch of its Build Challenge, the second phase of a contest designed to expand the discovery experience offered by Thomson Reuters Web of KnowledgeSM. The competition challenges the research community to develop innovative visualization tools that illustrate the connections found in data, citations and research by using Web of Knowledge application programming interfaces (APIs).
Thomson Reuters will award up to $30,000 to the participant who “builds” the best web-based or mobile visualization tools that both meet the contest criteria and highlight the various data relationships among the content indexed with the Web of Science®, the main citation database within the Web of Knowledge. Each solution must be demonstrated through the entry of a prototype or workable code and white paper. The Build Challenge will be open for submissions until July 25.
The program development solutions will be based on the winning submissions from the initial phase of the competition, the Ideation Challenge. In this first part of the challenge series Thomson Reuters called upon the research community to develop concept papers on new and inventive ways for users to interact with the content and tools within the Web of Knowledge. The Ideation Challenge attracted over 830 solvers from around the world and received 177 submissions.
“While we received a broad and diverse collection of ideas during the Ideation Challenge, an overwhelming amount of submissions were primarily focused on the visualization of data,” said Ellen Rotenberg, senior innovation product manager at Thomson Reuters. “Researchers are increasingly interested in using visualizations to navigate the various relationships between artifacts and metadata related to scholarly content.”
Thomson Reuters Sciencewatch.com has interviews with the three winning Ideation Challenge innovators featuring the details and ideas behind their inventive concepts.
“There is no voice greater than that of the customer,” said Gordon Macomber, managing director of Thomson Reuters Scientific & Scholarly Research. “We engaged with the Web of Knowledge user community in a unique way during the Ideation Challenge, seeing their valuable suggestions for enhancing the progress of scientific and scholarly research. The Build Challenge takes this conversation one step further by engaging the expertise of the technologists in our community. We look forward to seeing the developments from this second stage.”
Thomson Reuters is partnering with crowdsourcing leader InnoCentive for the Ideation and Build Challenges. “ 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 to help improve upon and bring valuable new products and services to market,” said Alph Bingham, co-founder and board member of InnoCentive. “We are very gratified to see the excellent solver participation and quality of submissions in the Ideation Challenge, and can’t wait to see our Global Solver Community take things to the next level with the Build Challenge.”
Visit www.wokinfo.com/challenge to learn more about the Build and Ideation Challenges. For the terms and conditions of the Build Challenge, visit https://www.innocentive.com/ar/contract/printUnsigned/110 . Follow the challenge and learn more about the previous challenge on the InnoCentive Seeker Spotlight blog.
