Quosa's makes sharing simple.(Product/service evaluation)

Byline: Mark Chillingworth

Quosa's makes sharing simple resist

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.

It 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 that members of a team or organisation can access and share. Quosa has also been developed to integrate with citation management applications such as EndNote.

As a plug-in, Quosa is obtained by download from the website. Once installed, the system is up and running within minutes. The Oxford Quosa office is developing Athens authentication, which will enable users in academia and the NHS to add it to their toolkit.