A Web Service for Biomedical Term Look-Up.pdfVIP

Comparative and Functional Genomics Comp Funct Genom 2005; 6: 86–93. Published online in Wiley InterScience (). DOI: 10.1002/cfg.459 Conference Paper A web service for biomedical term look-up Henk Harkema*, Ian Roberts, Rob Gaizauskas and Mark Hepple Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK *Correspondence to: Abstract Henk Harkema, Dept of Computer Science, University of Recent years have seen a huge increase in the amount of biomedical information Sheffield, Regent Court, 211 that is available in electronic format. Consequently, for biomedical researchers Portobello Street, Sheffield S1 wishing to relate their experimental results to relevant data lurking somewhere within 4DP, UK. this expanding universe of on-line information, the ability to access and navigate E-mail: harkema@dcs.shef.ac.uk biomedical information sources in an efficient manner has become increasingly important. Natural language and text processing techniques can facilitate this task by making the information contained in textual resources such as MEDLINE more readily accessible and amenable to computational processing. Names of biological entities such as genes and proteins provide critical links between different biomedical information sources and researchers’ experimental data. Therefore, automatic identification and classification of these terms in text is an essential capability of any natural language processing system aimed at managing the wealth