Quosa's sharing habit will be hard to resist.

Byline: Mark Chillingworth

Quosa's sharing habit will be hard to resist

The simplest way yet to let colleagues share, organise and analyse STM information services? Mark Chillingworth downloads and delves

All the major players in the information sector are developing integrated workflow technology. In plain English, workflow tools let users take published content from a web-based information source and utilise it in a whole variety of ways. Elsevier, Factiva, Wiley and Thomson are just a few with such offerings available.

Quosa is an information management application that offers search, organising and sharing tools for the scientific, technical and medical (STM) online information sources Ovid, PubMed and Google Scholar.

At last year's Online Information show, Quosa was one of the highlights of the Ovid stand, following a deal between the two companies in the autumn. Quosa is basically a desktop plug-in that wraps itself around your browser. It does not replace the search engine of the information source; Quosa's search facilities are text mining tools that let you dig deeply into the content once it has been retrieved.

The main driver for adopting Quosa is its ability to create an information sharing environment. It lets users create virtual libraries of information that other members of a team or organisation can access and share. Quosa has also been developed to integrate with citation management applications such as EndNote.