Methodology article

An open source infrastructure for managing knowledge and finding potential collaborators in a domain-specific subset of PubMed, with an example from human genome epidemiology

Wei Yu¹ , Ajay Yesupriya¹ , Anja Wulf¹ , Junfeng Qu² , Muin J Khoury¹ and Marta Gwinn¹

¹  National Office of Public Health Genomics, Coordinating Center for Health Promotion, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA, USA

²  Department of Information Technology, Clayton State University, Atlanta, GA, USA

author email corresponding author email

BMC Bioinformatics 2007, 8:436doi:10.1186/1471-2105-8-436

Published:	9 November 2007

Abstract

Background

Identifying relevant research in an ever-growing body of published literature is becoming increasingly difficult. Establishing domain-specific knowledge bases may be a more effective and efficient way to manage and query information within specific biomedical fields. Adopting controlled vocabulary is a critical step toward data integration and interoperability in any information system. We present an open source infrastructure that provides a powerful capacity for managing and mining data within a domain-specific knowledge base. As a practical application of our infrastructure, we presented two applications – Literature Finder and Investigator Browser – as well as a tool set for automating the data curating process for the human genome published literature database. The design of this infrastructure makes the system potentially extensible to other data sources.

Results

Information retrieval and usability tests demonstrated that the system had high rates of recall and precision, 90% and 93% respectively. The system was easy to learn, easy to use, reasonably speedy and effective.

Conclusion

The open source system infrastructure presented in this paper provides a novel approach to managing and querying information and knowledge from domain-specific PubMed data. Using the controlled vocabulary UMLS enhanced data integration and interoperability and the extensibility of the system. In addition, by using MVC-based design and Java as a platform-independent programming language, this system provides a potential infrastructure for any domain-specific knowledge base in the biomedical field.