Literature-related discovery (LRD): Water purification

Abstract Literature-related discovery (LRD) is the linking of two or more literature concepts that have heretofore not been linked (i.e., disjoint), in order to produce novel, interesting, plausible, and intelligible knowledge (i.e., potential discovery). LRD has two main components that differ in their methodological approach to discovery: Literature-based discovery (LBD) produces potential discovery through analysis of the technical literature alone; Literature-assisted discovery (LAD) produces potential discovery through both analysis of the technical literature and use of selected authors of that literature. These authors generate potential discovery as proposers, workshop/panel participants, or in other active roles. The open discovery systems (ODS) component of LRD starts with a problem to be solved, and generates solutions to that problem through potential discovery. We have been using ODS LRD to identify potential treatments or preventative actions for challenging medical problems, among myriad other applications. The previous four papers in this Special Issue describe the application of ODS LRD (specifically, the ODS LBD variant) to Raynaud's Phenomenon (RP), cataracts, Parkinson's Disease (PD), and Multiple Sclerosis (MS). One goal of the present study was to determine whether LRD could be successfully applied (for the first time) to a challenging non-medical technical problem to generate potential discovery. The second goal was to explore the use of both LRD variants (LBD and LAD) to a non-medical technical problem. We selected the problem of water purification (WP) because of universal applicability and sponsor interest. We used LRD to identify purification concepts, technology components and systems that could lead to improved water purification techniques. We accessed many disparate disciplines to identify purification concepts from literatures not normally associated with water purification. We used two LBD approaches, Cluster Filtering and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), to search for potential discovery. We generated voluminous amounts of potential discovery, and believe we have only scratched the surface of what is possible. We also ran a short experiment using LAD to identify experts associated with potential discovery concepts, and use their expertise to generate potential discovery for water purification.