A next-generation research tool that provides universities with a self-serve approach and an unmatched content collection
Today LexisNexis® Legal & Professional, a leading global provider of information and analytics, announces the new Nexis® Data Lab to address the challenges universities face with big data mining and analysis.
With over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data generated each day, big data mining and analysis has become big business. But it also comes with big challenges for academic research, including reliable search and capture, secure sharing, authoritative sourcing and data visualization.
Nexis Data Lab is a next-generation data mining and analysis tool that allows students and academic researchers to search across the world-leading Nexis news archive. It streamlines the analytical experience and reduces the time and complexity of curating a data set—getting the data into an analytical environment faster. Users can search, refine, analyze and visualize thousands of documents in mere minutes, all within a secure, end-to-end, cloud-based Jupytr notebook. Traditional API solutions can take days or even weeks to render the results of big data research—time many researchers just don’t have.
“Our academic customers told us they wanted to enable students and professors to quickly mine big data in a controlled environment. That is exactly what Nexis Data Lab delivers,” said Todd Larsen, president of Nexis Solutions. “With Nexis Data Lab, we deliver a system that’s fully administered on our end and has a very simple yet powerful workspace. With just a few clicks, users can perform data discovery and analysis to surface precise answers to their specific research questions—and even discover trends they might not have uncovered through traditional methods.”
Unlike other big data solutions, Data Lab was designed for both novice and experienced researchers. With open-sourced and pre-packaged LexisNexis-developed Python libraries, users don’t even need to download and install their own code; however, more experienced users can modify the code or even embed their own. In addition, analysis can be viewed in both text- and graphical formats. Data Lab also makes it easy for professors or peer reviewers at academic journals to easily replicate the exact study and verify the findings.
According to Manon van der Velde, vice president of product at Nexis Solutions, the streamlined experience Data Lab delivers will vastly improve the way librarians and professors—often the gatekeepers to traditional big data collection and analysis—interact with the students and researchers who are looking for answers.
“This end-to-end, turnkey solution is very intuitive to use and frees up time for librarians and professors to play a more strategic advisory role for their students, as well as adding time back into their schedules for their own projects,” van der Velde explained.
In the coming months, more features will be added to Nexis Data Lab, including additional content, increased content capacity within the Jupytr notebook environment, collaboration tools and enhanced visualization options.
