CORAAL - Towards deep exploitation of textual resources in life sciences

Abstract

Prominent biomedical literature search tools like ScienceDirect, PubMed Central or MEDLINE allow for efficient retrieval of resources based on key words. Due to vast amounts of data available in life sciences, key word search is not always sufficient, though. One would often welcome more intelligent search for knowledge, i.e., for concepts and their mutual relations. This is, however, still a major challenge, since getting the necessary machine-readable knowledge manually is virtually impossible in large scale, while its automatic extraction is not particularly reliable. We have researched a novel framework actually enabling practical exploitation of automatically extracted knowledge, though. On the top of the framework, we implemented CORAAL, a prototype for knowledge-based biomedical literature search. This paper describes its essential principles, innovative capabilities and current results. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.