BioLINK:
Linking Literature, Information and Knowledge for Biology
With the increasing availability of textual information related to biology including Medline abstracts and full-text journal articles, the field of biomedical text mining has been rapidly maturing. It is concerned with using techniques from natural language processing, information extraction and information retrieval to automate knowledge discovery from biomedical text.
The BioLINK SIG meeting has been regularly held in association with the ISMB conference since 2001. The SIG focuses on the development and application of resources and tools for biomedical text mining. It is interdisciplinary in nature, and brings researchers applying natural language processing, text mining, information extraction and retrieval in the biomedical domain, together with scientists from bioinformatics and biology.
The meeting includes invited talks, presentations of peer-reviewed contributed papers, as well as a poster session. As was evident in last year's meeting, research in the area spans a variety of topics ranging from evaluation methods and corpora to specific text mining tasks such as curation assistance and lab-assistance tools. Another current and important direction, which was further highlighted in the recent text-mining session at PSB'06, is the need to further advance the field by linking together multiple sources and types of biological knowledge. Such sources include curated organism databases and biomedical ontologies.
Information about last year's BioLINK meeting (BioLINK05), which was held jointly with The ACL Workshop on Linking Biological Literature, Ontologies and Databases: Mining Biological Semantics, can be found on the BioLINK05 web site.
BioLink Organisers
- Hagit Shatkay, Queens University, Canada
- Lynette Hirschman, MITRE Corporation
- Alfonso Valencia, Spanish Bioinformatics Institute
- Christian Blaschke, bioalma, Madrid, Spain.
BioLINK programme committee
- Sophia Ananiadou, University of Manchester, UK
- Kevin Cohen, University of Colorado, USA
- Nigel Collier, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
- Carol Friedman, Columbia University, USA
- Udo Hahn, Jena University, Germany
- William Hayes, Biogen IDEC, USA
- Marti Hearst, University of California at Berkeley, USA
- Eivind Hovig, Institute of Cancer Research, Norway
- Larry Hunter, University of Colorado, USA
- Lars Jensen, EMBL, Germany
- Michael Krauthammer, Yale University, USA
- Marc Light, University of Iowa, USA
- Joel Martin, National Research Council, Canada
- Jong Park, KAIST, South Korea
- Luis Rocha, University of Indiana, USA
- Patrick Ruch, University and Hospitals of Geneva, Switzerland
- Andrey Rzhetsky, Columbia University, USA
- Padmini Srinivasan, University of Iowa, USA
- Lorrie Tanabe, National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), USA
- Jun-ichi Tsujii, University of Tokyo, Japan
- Karin Verspoor, Los Alamos National Laboratories, USA
- Marc Weeber, KnewCo Inc., The Netherlands
- John Wilbur, National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), USA