WebLib LLC has released NLMplus, “a semantic search and knowledge discovery application that utilizes a variety of semantic resources and natural language processing tools to produce improved search results from the vast collection of biomedical data and services of the National Library of Medicine (NLM).”

According to the article, “The NLMplus app combines a number of leading-edge semantic knowledge resources and technologies, such as a biomedical knowledge base, a semantic search engine, a distributed search engine, and a variety of smart content analysis and discovery services. Read more

A recent article makes the case for a standard language in the life sciences. The article begins, “In July, hundreds of international scientists from dozens of
biomedical fields will meet at the University at Buffalo seeking a common language with which to energize cross-disciplinary research… The public may assume that when biomedical scientists talk, they use the same words to mean the same things. But as [Barry] Smith points out, in different research fields, even such common terms as ‘pain,’ ‘gene,’ ‘blood’ and ‘cancer’ may have very different meanings as used in different contexts. With the exponential growth of biomedical data, this simple fact has enormous implications. It leads to incompatibilities that frequently confuse, halt cross-disciplinary research and severely limit communication among researchers.” Read more