Research tools able to swiftly analyse masses of data could soon bring about advances that scientists up to now can only dream of...Scientific research is being added to at an alarming rate: the Human Genome Project alone is generating enough documentation to "sink battleships". So it's not surprising that academics seeking data to support a new hypothesis are getting swamped with information overload. As data banks build up worldwide, and access gets easier through technology, it has become easier to overlook vital facts and figures that could bring about groundbreaking discoveries.
The [UK] government's response has been to set up the National Centre for Text Mining, the world's first centre devoted to developing tools that can systematically analyse multiple research papers, abstracts and other documents, and then swiftly determine what they contain. Text mining uses artificial intelligence techniques to look in texts for entities (a quality or characteristic, such as a date or job title) and concepts (the relationship between two genes, for example)....Initially, the centre is focusing on bioscience and biomedical texts to meet the increasing need for automated ways to interrogate, extract and manage textual information now flooding out of large-scale bio-projects....Text-mining tools in use include Cafetiere, an information extraction tool that annotates text with information about entities and the relationships between them. Termine, a tool for handling terminology, is being re-engineered by the centre so that it can deal with large volumes of data. The centre...will act as a repository for such tools, as well as developing its own. One key task will be plugging the number of different tools for different tasks into one coherent framework. "This infrastructure will allow many people's tools to work together in a mix and match way, the mix of which will depend on the intended application," says Barker.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/12/2006 09:10:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
