BioMap
Biological literature databases continue to grow rapidly with vital information that is important for conducting sound biomedical research. As data and information space continue to grow exponentially, the need for rapidly surveying the published literature, synthesizing, and discovering the embedded "knowledge" is becoming critical to allow the researchers to conduct "informed" work, avoid repetition, and generate new hypotheses. Knowledge, in this case, is defined as one-to-many and many-to-many relationships among biological entities such as gene, protein, drug, disease, etc. The knowledge discovery process basically involves identification of biological object names, reference resolution, ontology and synonym discovery, and finally extracting object-object relationships. We have developed a system called BioMap, using the entire MEDLINE collection of (over 12 million) bibliographic citations and author abstracts from over 4600 biomedical journals worldwide and to develop an interactive knowledge network for users to access this secondary knowledge.
The BioMap "knowledgebase" may significantly enhance the ability of biological researchers with diverse objectives to efficiently utilize online resources, generate methods for analysis of biological data such as identifying biological pathways, and provide computerized support for disease target and new drug discovery. BioMap is a new type of "secondary" knowledge resource derived from primary resources such as MEDLINE collection. It will be the "window" to every biomedical researcher who will be seeking knowledge from the literature databases, however, without being overwhelmed by its large volume.