BioCreative Meta-Server and Text-Mining Interoperability Standard

Abstract

Over the past decade, text-mining systems have matured to serve both bioinformaticians and biologists in a variety of ways. However, this also has the negative impact that a plethora of protocols, sites, and tools exist that are not compatible between each other. With the BioCreative Meta-Server (BCMS) the first prototype system to counterbalance this development was published. Because of uniting several text-mining systems into one service using one protocol, both access and use of those resources could be significantly simplified. In addition, the BCMS provides a straightforward means to combine results from multiple text-mining systems, contributing an added benefit that can lead to an even higher quality result than the individual annotations of the systems available through the BCMS. To push the capabilities of text-mining systems even further, a project was recently launched to create a text-mining community consensus on an interoperability standard for the an