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Biomedical Data/Content Acquisition, Curation

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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Synonyms

Biomedical data annotation

Definition

The largest source of biomedical knowledge is the published literature, where results of experimental studies are reported in natural language. Published literature is hard to query, integrate computationally or to reason over. The task of reading published papers (or other forms of experimental results such as pharmacogenomics datasets) and distilling them down into structured knowledge that can be stored in databases as well as knowledgebases is called curation. The statements comprising the structured knowledge are called annotations. The level of structure in annotation statements can vary from loose declarations of “associations” between concepts (such as associating a paper with the concept “colon cancer”) to statements that declare a precisely defined relationship between concepts with explicit semantics. There is an inherent tradeoff between the level of detail of the structured annotations and the time and effort required to...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Nigam Shah

Authors
  1. Nigam Shah
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Shah, N. (2009). Biomedical Data/Content Acquisition, Curation. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_37

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