The National Library of Medicine (National Library of Medicine[1], NLM) of the United States, which provides access to the largest electronic database of medical articles in the world, has made an announcement on the significant benefits they have from their participation in the challenge of computer systems organized by the European project BioASQ, which is coordinated by the National Center for Scientific Research "Demokritos". Specifically, NLM researchers say that thanks to the BioASQ challenge, they have improved the Medical Text Indexer[2] (MTI), which indexes the biomedical literature based on the MeSH thesaurus (Medical Subject Headings[3]). The entire announcement from NLM can be found here: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/news/indexer_challenge.html.
BioaASQ is a program that aims to promote research on information systems that are capable of answering questions of biomedical content. To promote research in this area, BioASQ organizes challenges, in which some of the best known research groups in the world participate.
The BioASQ team combines researchers with complementary expertise from 6 organizations in 3 countries: the Greek National Center for Scientific Research “Demokritos” (coordinator), participating with its Institutes of ‘Informatics & Telecommunications’ and ‘Biosciences & Applications’, the German IT company Transinsight GmbH, the French University Joseph Fourier, the German research Group for Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web at the University of Leipzig, the French University Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris 6 and the Research Center of the Athens University of Economics and Business in Greece. Moreover, biomedical experts from several countries assist in the creation of the evaluation data and a number of key persons in industry and academia from around the world participate in the advisory board. BioASQ has received funding from the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013, ICT-2011.4.4(d), Intelligent Information Management, Targeted Competition Framework) under grant agreement n° 318652.
More information can be found at: http://www.bioasq.org.
Project Coordinator: George Paliouras (paliourg@iit.demokritos.gr)
