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. It will focus on recent assessments, on standards for annotation both in biological databases and in biomedical text corpora, and on new tools for biomedical text mining. The SIG solicits papers and talks that discuss text mining tools and their application to biomedical research and to biological database curation, examine the inter-relations between database curation tasks and text mining, and the utility of existing resources - as well as the development of future ones - to expedite progress in the interdisciplinary research field of biomedical text-mining.

 We anticipate a fruitful workshop that will facilitate discussion and exchange of ideas, by bringing researchers applying natural language processing, ontologies, text mining, information extraction and retrieval in the biomedical domain, together with scientists from bioinformatics and biology.

 Information about last year's meeting, which was held jointly with the BioOntologies SIG, can be found on the JBB06 web site.

Page last updated by James Gray