MarkLogic Significantly Reduces Thieme Application Development Time

• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage

• Product Research & Development

• Data Science Services

Thieme Publishing Group, a medium-sized company in a competitive landscape, needed a database solution that allows for agile data management, storage, enrichment, and delivery. They had millions of medical and scientific documents, images, and graphics, all of which were available in different formats that existed in many data silos. This situation made product development and deployment labor-intensive. In order to be successful against international competition as well as free search services like Google or Yahoo, Thieme needed to quickly deliver a platform that was capable of making highly annotated, enriched content easily searchable and accessible to a wide range of users. Because there was no standard platform or language to develop on, the heavily siloed nature of Thieme's data and products made scaling a very cumbersome and elaborate process. IT had to start from scratch to create each new product.

Thieme is an award-winning international medical and science publisher serving health professionals, students, and scientists for more than 125 years. Thieme promotes the most recent advancements in clinical practice, publishes the latest scientific research findings, and advocates medical education. Thieme is well known for the high quality and didactic nature of its books, journals, and electronic products. In addition to publishing 450 new book titles every year, Thieme publishes more than 15 medical and scientific journals both in print and electronic form as well as dozens of online products.

Thieme selected the MarkLogic® Enterprise NoSQL database platform to serve as the basis for all of its data management, including configuration, integration, storage, and delivery. To allow users to efficiently mine this wealth of content, Thieme leveraged the MarkLogic Semantics feature to implement enriched text and highly configurable search functionalities, allowing users to perform relevant real-time text searches. MarkLogic powers over 20 Thieme products including: eRef, Science of Synthesis, and eNeurosurgery. Using MarkLogic Enterprise NoSQL as the database platform for all of its data management and integration has allowed Thieme to configure, structure, and integrate millions of documents and images from thousands of different sources into a suite of comprehensive electronic reference products, making it easy to pull and deliver relevant data to targeted audiences.

• The company can now reuse modules from one application to the next, developing more than one new product at a given time using existing functionalities.
• With MarkLogic, the development and deployment process is more predictable because there is a very established base of functionalities and knowledge within Thieme.
• Thieme's graphical user interface and intuitive search and semantics functionalities based on MarkLogic allow users to perform real-time text searches that yield targeted and relevant results.

• Development times for new products have been clearly reduced. In the past, building new products took years, but MarkLogic has standardized the development and deployment process and now it just takes months.
• After adopting MarkLogic, Thieme developed about 20 new products in the past few years, laying the foundation for digital products and services that Thieme can use to build new revenue streams for the next 10-15 years.