illumin8 Increases Corporate R&D Productivity With New Technology Landscaping Capabilities

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - October 29, 2008) - Elsevier, the leading publisher of scientific, medical and technical products and services, today announced the newest upgrade to illumin8 (www.illumin8.com), a Web-based semantic text-mining solution designed to help corporate research professionals answer complex R&D questions with greater speed and effectiveness. The product is part of Elsevier's portfolio of advanced information retrieval tools that transforms its high value content into actionable knowledge to improve ROI for corporate R&D and drive efficient, effective innovation.

For end-users, illumin8 is now even "smarter" in that users do not need to remember arcane search parameters or syntax. Instead, users can simply enter the phrase they are interested in and the system figures out how to interpret it. This built-out search logic is able to ferret out very relevant, specific information to answer tough questions for R&D professionals working in innovation, technology intelligence and related areas.

"Users have specifically noted that doing research without illumin8 would have taken weeks and wasted countless hours sifting through data that was not relevant to each individual project," said Shawn Holt, vice president, product & business development with Elsevier for illumin8. "illumin8 allows researchers to cut to the chase and reflects our commitment to delivering Elsevier's high quality content in a way that is most readily usable and reliable for our corporate customers."

Enhanced technology landscaping capabilities provide R&D users with new result types that prove valuable for research projects on specific technology categories. With this upgrade researchers will experience a boost in productivity and a faster and more seamless research process, including:

--  Richer results providing a technology overview or landscape including
    organizations, products, approaches, benefits, people associated with a
    technology or product category;
--  Smarter search logic that relieves the user of having to enter
    specialized syntax or parameters;
--  Explicit display of result types showing the semantic relationship of
    the result to the search input; and,
--  Addition of nearly half a million pre-defined technology terms to the
    search guide.
    

These enhancements operate on illumin8's vast content store, comprised of Elsevier's premium full-text content, scientific abstracts from 4,000 publishers, millions of patents and 5 billion Web pages.

illumin8 searches across a wide range of technical and subject domains allowing it to serve the needs of research professionals in a number of different fields, including automotive, oil & gas, electronics, chemicals, coatings, home repair/decoration, consumer goods and packaging.

About illumin8

illumin8 (www.illumin8.com) is a part of Elsevier's suite of online solutions that unlocks new value from the company's worldclass content and other sources, improves ROI for corporate R&D and drives more efficient, effective innovation. illumin8 is revolutionary in that it is designed to go beyond elementary Google keyword search, leveraging patent-pending semantic indexing technology to extract a detailed summary of benefits/applications, innovators, products, experts, users, organizations associated with and sellers of technologies. illumin8 users can also access the full-text of Elsevier journals if they have an online subscription to the journal through ScienceDirect (www.sciencedirect.com), the world's largest online platform of science, technical and medical (STM) content. Elsevier offers a broad spectrum of solutions to make Research and Development processes more efficient. More information can be found at www.elsevierforindustry.com.

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier's 7,000 employees in over 70 offices worldwide publish more than 2,000 journals and 1,900 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, such as Science Direct. (www.sciencedirect.com/), MDConsult (www.mdconsult.com/), Scopus (www.info.scopus.com/), bibliographic databases, and online reference works.

Elsevier (www.elsevier.com/) is a global business headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has offices worldwide. Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc (www.reedelsevier.com/), a world-leading publisher and information provider. Operating in the science and medical, legal, education and business-to-business sectors, Reed Elsevier provides high-quality and flexible information solutions to users, with increasing emphasis on the Internet as a means of delivery. Reed Elsevier's ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

Contact Information: Tom Reller Director, Corporate Relations Elsevier T.Reller@elsevier.com 212-462-1912 Melissa Biles LaunchSquad melissa@launchsquad.com 415-625-8555