Knowledge Representation and Management

Abstract

SummaryObjectives: To summarize current outstanding research in the field of knowledge representation and management. Method: Synopsis of the articles selected for the IMIA Yearbook 2010. Results: Four interesting papers, dealing with structured knowledge, have been selected for the section knowledge representation and management. Combining the newest techniques in computational linguistics and natural language processing with the latest methods in statistical data analysis, machine learning and text mining has proved to be efficient for turning unstructured textual information into meaningful knowledge. Three of the four selected papers for the section knowledge representation and management corroborate this approach and depict various experiments conducted to .extract meaningful knowledge from unstructured free texts such as extracting cancer disease characteristics from pathology reports, or extracting protein-protein interactions from biomedical papers, as well as extracting knowledge for the support of hypothesis generation in molecular biology from the Medline literature. Finally, the last paper addresses the level of formally representing and structuring information within clinical terminologies in order to render such information easily available and shareable among the health informatics community. Conclusions: Delivering common powerful tools able to automatically extract meaningful information from the huge amount of electronically unstructured free texts is an essential step towards promoting sharing and reusability across applications, domains, and institutions thus contributing to building capacities worldwide.