The National Library of Medicine (NLM), on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, has been a center of information innovation since its founding in 1836. The world’s largest biomedical library, NLM maintains and makes available a vast print collection and produces electronic information resources on a wide range of topics that are searched billions of times each year by millions of people around the globe. It also supports and conducts research, development, and training in biomedical informatics and health information technology. In addition, the Library coordinates a 6,000-member National Network of Libraries of Medicine that promotes and provides access to health information in communities across the United States.
NLM has an active interest in BioASQ since BioASQ goals are closely related to NLM's Medical Text Indexer (MTI), a system for producing indexing recommendations, which assists in the indexing process at NLM. During the project, a fruitful collaboration between BioASQ and The Biomedical Communications Research Division of NLM has been established. NLM has been providing challenge data, including article abstracts, article full texts and manually annotated MESH headers. NLM has also contributed to the process of data preparation against the challenge setup constraints, while NLM's MTI indexer is used as the baseline system for BioASQ large-scale biomedical semantic indexing tasks. Furthermore, Alan R. Aronson, PhD, Principal Investigator for the NLM's MTI project delivered an invited talk at the BioASQ Workshop in September 2013.
For more information on NLM please visit the NLM website.
