This allows KDT to go beyond simply showing a web page of links pertinent to a particular subject. It allows its users to see how the entities are linked together at different levels of certainty. It uncovers hidden linkages by intelligently traversing the integrated knowledge web and deriving additional relationships. It also highlights certain unusual links that might be worth exploring. KDT comes with a unique web-enabled user interface that allows users to navigate through a large knowledge web with ease, view a large set of relationships at once and create additional annotations.
KDT has been shown useful in the early stage of the drug discovery process in Pharmaceutical companies in several ways. First, it can quickly show the researchers how two seemingly unrelated entities may be related to each other such as the relationships between two diseases. This will help the researchers to quickly narrow down the scope of their literature search and identify which route to pursue. Second, it can quickly prioritize potential biological targets and identifies the relationships among those targets. Third, it can be used to identify potential collaboration opportunities among its users to remove potential redundant activities across the organization by matching their bookmarks, navigation history and profiles.
KDT is implemented as a three-tier web-based architecture. The back-end components that are responsible for data extraction, integration and link creation, heavily utilize a relational database, third party data interfaces and a large set of custom Java components. The middle-tier application server is based on Java 2 Enterprise Edition. The front-end visualization component is a Java applet downloadable to any Java-enabled web browser.