Discovery of Biomedical Databases Through Semantic Questioning

Abstract

Many clinical studies are greatly dependent on an efficient identification of relevant datasets. This selection can be performed in existing health data catalogues, by searching for available metadata. The search process can be optimised through questioning-answering interfaces, to help researchers explore the available data present. However, when searching the distinct catalogues the lack of metadata harmonisation imposes a few bottlenecks. This paper presents a methodology to allow semantic search over several biomedical database catalogues, by extracting the information using a shared domain knowledge. The resulting pipeline allows the converted data to be published as FAIR endpoints, and it provides an end-user interface that accepts natural language questions.