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 together researchers applying natural language processing, text mining, information extraction and retrieval in the biomedical domain, with scientists from bioinformatics and biology.

 The meeting includes invited talks, presentations of peer-reviewed contributed papers, as well as a poster session. This year's SIG will focus on the theme of automated linkage of the literature to biological resources in support of applications such as: automated indexing of the biomedical literature, generation of structured digital abstracts and the use of text-mined data in biology and bioinformatics pipelines. To stimulate discussion, we will invite a set of "end users" to present their applications and text mining needs, with a specific goal of encouraging partnerships among the end users and the developers of text mining tools.

The SIG solicits papers that discuss current biological text-related needs, the challenges of meeting them, and the tools that may help address them. Topics may include development and application of text-tools for biomedical research and for biological database curation, inter-relations between database curation and text mining, as well as new tools, new applications and future directions in 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,can be found on the BioLINK07 web site.

Page last updated by Hagit Shatkay