Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

Published Literature findings act as a key driver for decision making in drug discovery and biotechnology industry. Majority of the researchers prefer PubMed for published literature since it is a free resource for dissemination of scientific information. Data mining biomedical information from PubMed has been a long-standing problem for many researchers across the globe. On an average more than 50,000 scientific abstracts get published in PubMed every month and for a researcher it is a highly time consuming task to pick the most relevant abstracts everyday and annotate them accurately for research purposes. Though many text mining NLP (Natural Language Processing) engines are used to address this problem, manually annotated data has its own advantages in terms of accuracy and quality of the data that is captured. However, one of the major disadvantages with manual data mining still happens to be the processing time and its cost intensive nature. So the need arises for a system, which ...

Is Facebook a phenomenon — or a fad? In the two years since Facebook opened its platform to outside developers, more than 300,000 Facebook applications, or "apps," have been created — games, quizzes, digital gifts and more. The successful apps boost users' engagement with Facebook — sometimes called "stickiness" — but do not directly provide revenue. Piggybacking on Facebook has been profitable for several startups. Zynga, which according to some reports is raking in annual revenues of $100 million with the poker game Texas Hold'em and other games, has grown from 45 employees to more than 250 in the past year, Pincus said. About "70 percent, perhaps 80 percent" of Zynga's growth, he said, could be attributed to Facebook. Flixster's growth also illustrates Facebook's role as a driver of Web innovation. Founded in January 2006, Flixster.com was attracting about 4 million monthly unique visitors when Facebook opened its development ...

There's a great deal of wisdom in a crowd, but how do you listen to a thousand people talking at once? Identifying the wants, needs, and knowledge of internet users can be like listening to a mob. In the Web 2.0 era, leveraging the collective power of user contributions, interactions, and feedback is the key to market dominance. A new category of powerful programs and web based technology lets you discover the patterns, inter-relationships, and individual profiles-the collective intelligence, locked in the data people leave behind as they surf websites, post blogs, and interact with other users. XTractor Premium is one such initiative, epitome of Collective Intelligence in Action for bio medical data. Implemens collective intelligence concepts of vital data gathering and mining techniques like analyzing trends, discovering relationships, and making predictions. It provides a pragmatic approach to personalization by combining content-based analysis with collaborative approaches ...

Here is a wonderful article i came across recently: How to Use These Applications to Make Your Company Recession-Resistant , By Daniel Burrus . Most people are familiar with the term "Web 2.0," which refers to a second generation of web development and design that focuses on fostering social networking via the web. Innovative companies are beginning to embrace Web 2.0 as a way to enhance communication, information sharing, and collaboration, thereby allowing them to work smarter rather than harder. The business use of Web 2.0 represents a new trend called "Business 2.0." Aside from being the name of a defunct magazine, Business 2.0 is about using the new web-based social networking applications (many of which were originally created for personal use) in a way that fosters teamwork, customer touches, and internal and external collaboration in a low-cos...

Here is a hand picked item, one of my favorites among the recent blogs that came across. This articles reflects and talks about many things which i have appreciated in the recent times and have blogged in the past web 2.0 .... Why should a (bioinformatics) scientist learn web development ? Up to now bioinformatics research with genomics datasets, has been happening like that: you download the data from a website of a big-iron institution ( NCBI , TAIR ), set them up locally, BLAST ‘em, MySQL’em, parse them with Perl script, and do all other sorts of un-imaginable things. Even though bioinformaticians might be un-aware of the term, part of the local processing that happens with the data is a mashup. This term translates to the combination of pieces of data from different sources, something akin to what has been happening on the web (see also Web 2.0 or programmable web ). In no way this is close to the myriad of Web 2.0 mashups that exist out there, created using APIs offered openly...

Ask XTractor - XTractor™ now turns ON its ‘Insta Search’. Get a snapshot of the XTractor data for your desired query using the Insta Search feature. Which are the biological processes involved in Leukemia? What are the drugs associated with Ovarian Neoplasm? What are the diseases modulated by FRAP? Then get a snapshot of the XTractor data from the latest published abstracts on your questions using the 'Insta Search' feature. Be a part of the XTractor community. XTractor is the first of its kind - Literature alert service , that provides manually curated and annotated sentences for the Keywords of user preference. XTractor maps the extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies and enables customized report generation. With XTractor the sentences are categorized into biological significant relationships and it also provides the user with the ability to create his own database for a set of Key terms. Also the user could change the Keywords...

US FDA , NIH , NCI , MD Anderson , Harvard Medical School , Novartis , Wyeth , AstraZeneca , Vertex , P&G , JNJ many more subscribe to XTractor. “XTractor™ is an intelligence that works so unconscious even for the users to perceive. It is fascinating as to how quickly XTractor transforms the most complex scientific facts into structured knowledge almost instantaneously by bringing about cross entity relationships across abstracts thereby aiding in quicker decision making through the Drug Discovery process” Bangalore, India, October 12, 2008 --( PR.com )-- Indian Life Sciences Informatics Company, Molecular Connections announced today, that its XTractor™ - The first of its kind scientific literature alert service launched in July ‘08 has built a user base of over 900 users form more than 150 premier organizations. XTractor™ has been widely accepted and received well in the scientific fraternity both the academia and the industry across the globe. Be a part of the XTractor commun...

Social networking is the latest buzz on the internet. You’ve heard about it, but what does it mean to you as a scientist? Well for one thing, it means that networking has never been easier. Here are six of the best social networking sites for scientists that are designed to help you make and maintain your professional contacts. 1. SciLink is a souped-up networking site that actually knows who a lot of your contacts will be before you even sign up. Uniquely, SciLink mines literature databases to build a network of professional relationships that you can slot into (and of course expand further) when you sign up. You can also find jobs, discussion, news etc on the site. 2. MyNetResearch is a powerful website for finding collaborators for your project. You set up your own account/profile and build a network of contacts as with the other social networks but MyNetResearch is designed to help you find people who work in the areas you are interested in (or interested in expanding into) and ...

It is pretty sure now, that web 2.0, the new generation of web services, will (and already is playing) play an important role in the future of medicine. These web tools, expert-based community sites, medical blogs and wikis can ease the work of physicians, scientists, medical students or medical librarians. Let us being to believe that the new generation of web services will change the way medicine is practiced and healthcare is delivered. Do you want to know more? Be a part of the XTractor community. XTractor is the first of its kind - Literature alert service , that provides manually curated and annotated sentences for the Keywords of user preference. XTractor maps the extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies and enables customized report generation. With XTractor the sentences are categorized into biological significant relationships and it also provides the user with the ability to create his own database for a set of Key terms. Also t...

XTractor - Discovering Newer Scientific Relations Across Abstracts http://www.xtractor.in/ Literature alert service, that provides manually curated and annotated sentences for the Keywords of user preference. XTractor maps the extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies and enables customized report generation. With XTractor the sentences are categorized into biological significant relationships and it also provides the user with the ability to create his own database for a set of Key terms. Also the user could change the Keywords of preference from time to time, with changing research needs. The categorized sentences could then be tagged and shared across multiple users. Thus XTractor proves to be a platform for getting real-time highly accurate data along with the ability to Share and collaborate. This has been added to Biological Informatics Subject Tracer Information Blog. This has been added to the tools section of Research Resources Subjec...

Yes i am talking about the development in the field of literature search and scientific publication search. Looking beyond NLP some of the advancements and service models based on NLP and other advanced methods. Today to the user's delight there are quite a few companies and organization that provide services that absolutely make an scientist life easy! These services revolve around customized alert services for selected search terms, specific research area of interest even more so pertaining to a list of custom key-word and search terms that the service providers allow the user to choose form. The scientist can simply subscribe to such service, sit back and wait for daily updates. The updates are provided on a day to day basis at his desktop. He gets abstract summarization , full text summarization so that he need not actually go through the ordeal of reading through pages of scientific literature. Some once else does the job for him and just pick up the right things that he woul...