Text mining: powering the database revolution

摘要

Mark Gerstein and colleagues in Correspondence (Nature 447,142; 2007) propose that journals should require authors to manually provide structured abstracts to facilitate text mining of biological information. There are three main difficulties in implementing such a proposal. First, life-science terminologies are huge, diversified and complex. This means that identifying the correct content descriptors is almost impossible for inexperienced users of online term repositories.