BioC: a minimalist approach to interoperability for biomedical text processing

Abstract

A vast amount of scientific information is encoded in natural language text, and the quantity of such text has become so great that it is no longer economically feasible to have a human as the first step in the search process. Natural language processing and text mining tools have become essential to facilitate the search for and extraction of information from text. This has led to vigorous research efforts to create useful tools and to create humanly labeled text corpora, which can be used to improve such tools. To encourage combining these efforts into larger, more powerful and more capable systems, a common interchange format to represent, store and exchange the data in a simple manner between different language processing systems and text mining tools is highly desirable. Here we propose a simple extensible mark-up language format to share text documents and annotations. The proposed annotation approach allows a large number of different annotations to be represented including sentences, tokens, parts of speech, named entities such as genes or diseases and relationships between named entities. In addition, we provide simple code to hold this data, read it from and write it back to extensible mark-up language files and perform some sample processing. We also describe completed as well as ongoing work to apply the approach in several directions. Code and data are available at http://bioc.sourceforge.net/.Database URL: http://bioc.sourceforge.net/

BC4GO: a full-text corpus for the BioCreative IV GO task

“…Specifically, we chose to format our data using the recently developed BioC standard for improved interoperability (44). First, for the 200 full-text articles, we converted their XMLs from the PMC format to the BioC format.…”

EMBnet.journal 19 Suppl. B

“…Both input and output of the system are defined according to the BioC standard [Comeau et al, 2013]. However typical usages will involve processing of PubMed abstracts or PubMed Central full papers.…”

BioC interoperability track overview

“…Implementations of BioC in C++ and Java were available before the workshop (1). As part of the workshop, several additional implementations were developed (2).…”