Infectious Disease Ontology

Technological developments have resulted in tremendous increases in the volume and diversity of the data and information that must be processed in the course of biomedical and clinical research and practice. Researchers are at the same time under ever greater pressure to share data and to take steps to ensure that data resources are interoperable. The use of ontologies to annotate data has proven successful in supporting these goals and in providing new possibilities for the automated processing of data and information. In this chapter, we describe different types of vocabulary resources and emphasize those features of formal ontologies that make them most useful for computational applications. We describe current uses of ontologies and discuss future goals for ontology-based computing, focusing on its use in the field of infectious diseases. We review the largest and most widely used vocabulary resources relevant to the study of infectious diseases and conclude with a description of the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) suite of interoperable ontology modules that together cover the entire infectious disease domain

Gerando redes de conhecimento a partir de descrições de fenótipos

Orientadores: André Santanchè, Júlio César dos ReisDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: Diversos sistemas computacionais usam informações sobre seres vivos, tais como chaves de identificação ¿ artefatos criados por biólogos para identificar espécimes de seres vivos seguindo uma cadeia de questões acerca das suas características observáveis (fenótipos). Tais questões estão em formato de texto livre, por exemplo, "Possui olhos grandes e pre- tos". Contudo, texto livre dificulta a interpretação de informação por máquinas, limitando sua capacidade de realização de tarefas de busca, integração e comparação de termos. Esta dissertação propõe um método para extrair informação a respeito de fenótipos a partir de textos escritos em linguagem natural, colocando-os no formato de Entidade-Qualidade ¿ um formato de dados biológicos para representar estruturas anatômicas (Entidade) e o seu modificador (Qualidade). A proposta permite que Entidades e Qualidades, reconhecidas automaticamente a partir de informação do nível textual, sejam relacionadas com con- ceitos presentes em ontologias de domínio. Ela adota ferramentas de Processamento de Linguagem Natural existentes, bem como contribui com novas técnicas que exploram as características de escrita e estruturação implícitas em textos presentes nas chaves de iden- tificação. A abordagem foi validada utilizando os dados da base FishBase, sobre a qual foram conduzidos experimentos explorando um conjunto de testes anotado manualmente para avaliar a precisão e aplicabilidade do método de extração proposto. Os resultados obtidos mostram os benefícios da técnica e possibilidades de estudos científicos utilizando a rede de conhecimento extraídaAbstract: Several computing systems rely on information about living beings, such as identification keys ¿ artifacts created by biologists to identify specimens following a flow of questions about their observable characters (phenotype). These questions are described in a free- text format, e.g., "big and black eye". Free-texts hamper the automatic information interpretation by machines, limiting their ability to perform search and comparison of terms, as well as integration tasks. This thesis proposes a method to extract phenotypic information from natural language texts from biology legacy information systems, trans- forming them in an Entity-Quality formalism ¿ a format to represent each phenotype character (Entity) and its state (Quality). Our approach aligns automatically recognized Entities and Qualities with domain concepts described in ontologies. It adopts existing Natural Language Processing techniques, adding an extra original step, which exploits intrinsic characteristics of phenotypic descriptions and of the organizational structure of identification keys. The approach was validated over the FishBase data. We conducted extensive experiments based on a manually annotated Gold Standard set to assess the precision and applicability of the proposed extraction method. The obtained results re- veal the feasibility of our technique, its benefits and possibilities of scientific studies using the extracted knowledge networkMestradoCiência da ComputaçãoMestre em Ciência da Computação1406900CAPE

NetiNeti : Discovery of Scientific Names from Text Using Machine Learning Methods Figure 1

Figure 1 demonstrates a series of training experiments with the Naïve Bayes classifier using different neighborhoods for contextual features, different sizes of positive and negative training examples and evaluated the resulting classifiers with our annotated gold standard corpus. The data sets are the results of running NetiNeti on subset of 136 PubMedCentral tagged open access articles and with no stop list.A scientific name for an organism can be associated with almost all biological data. Name identification is an important step in many text mining tasks aiming to extract useful information from biological, biomedical and biodiversity text sources. A scientific name acts as an important metadata element to link biological information.We present NetiNeti, a machine learning based approach for identification and discovery of scientific names. The system implementing the approach can be accessed at http://namefinding.ubio.org we present the comparison results of various machine learning algorithms on our annotated corpus. Naïve Bayes and Maximum Entropy with Generalized Iterative Scaling (GIS) parameter estimation are the top two performing algorithms

OrganismTagger: detection, normalization and grounding of organism entities in biomedical documents

Motivation: Semantic tagging of organism mentions in full-text articles is an important part of literature mining and semantic enrichment solutions. Tagged organism mentions also play a pivotal role in disambiguating other entities in a text, such as proteins. A high-precision organism tagging system must be able to detect the numerous forms of organism mentions, including common names as well as the traditional taxonomic groups: genus, species and strains. In addition, such a system must resolve abbreviations and acronyms, assign the scientific name and if possible link the detected mention to the NCBI Taxonomy database for further semantic queries and literature navigation. Results: We present the OrganismTagger, a hybrid rule-based/machine learning system to extract organism mentions from the literature. It includes tools for automatically generating lexical and ontological resources from a copy of the NCBI Taxonomy database, thereby facilitating system updates by end users. Its novel ontology-based resources can also be reused in other semantic mining and linked data tasks. Each detected organism mention is normalized to a canonical name through the resolution of acronyms and abbreviations and subsequently grounded with an NCBI Taxonomy database ID. In particular, our system combines a novel machine-learning approach with rule-based and lexical methods for detecting strain mentions in documents. On our manually annotated OT corpus, the OrganismTagger achieves a precision of 95%, a recall of 94% and a grounding accuracy of 97.5%. On the manually annotated corpus of Linnaeus-100, the results show a precision of 99%, recall of 97% and grounding accuracy of 97.4%. Availability: The OrganismTagger, including supporting tools, resources, training data and manual annotations, as well as end user and developer documentation, is freely available under an open-source license at http://www.semanticsoftware.info/organism-tagger. Contact: [email protected]

Named Entity Recognition for Bacterial Type IV Secretion Systems

Research on specialized biological systems is often hampered by a lack of consistent terminology, especially across species. In bacterial Type IV secretion systems genes within one set of orthologs may have over a dozen different names. Classifying research publications based on biological processes, cellular components, molecular functions, and microorganism species should improve the precision and recall of literature searches allowing researchers to keep up with the exponentially growing literature, through resources such as the Pathosystems Resource Integration Center (PATRIC, patricbrc.org). We developed named entity recognition (NER) tools for four entities related to Type IV secretion systems: 1) bacteria names, 2) biological processes, 3) molecular functions, and 4) cellular components. These four entities are important to pathogenesis and virulence research but have received less attention than other entities, e.g., genes and proteins. Based on an annotated corpus, large domain terminological resources, and machine learning techniques, we developed recognizers for these entities. High accuracy rates (>80%) are achieved for bacteria, biological processes, and molecular function. Contrastive experiments highlighted the effectiveness of alternate recognition strategies; results of term extraction on contrasting document sets demonstrated the utility of these classes for identifying T4SS-related documents

TX Task: Automatic detection of focus organisms in biomedical publications

In biomedical information extraction (IE), a central problem is the disambiguation of ambiguous names for domain specific entities, such as proteins, genes, etc. One important dimension of ambiguity is the organism to which the entities belong: in order to disambiguate an ambiguous entity name (e.g. a protein), it is often necessary to identify the specific organism to which it refers. In this paper we present an approach to the detection and disambiguation of the focus organism(s), i.e. the organism(s) which are the subject of the research described in scientific papers, which can then be used for the disambiguation of other entities. The results are evaluated against a gold standard derived from IntAct annotations. The evaluation suggests that the results may already be useful within a curation environment and are certainly a baseline for more complex approaches