USC project aims to ease and speed access to biomed data

Information Sciences Institute NeuroScholar software gets a $1 million boost

Neuroinformatics expert Gully A.P.C. Burns of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering Information Sciences Insitute. Click here for more information.

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences has announced a $1 million four-year grant to support ISI's Gully A.P.C. Burns' efforts to expand and enhance his highly successful NeuroScholar software efforts.

"The new project is very exciting," says Burns. "Our objective is to provide software that can be used in a laboratory to create a small-scale knowledge base for those scientific articles stored locally in that laboratory as PDF files."

Burns, who was the founder of ISI's Biomedical Knowledge Engineering Group (BKEG) notes that the knowledge-base for the study of neurobiology (and for biomedical research in general) poses unique access problems.

Typically it consists not only of an immense volume of easily searched and indexed alphanumeric results, but also of detailed images, many of which are three-dimensional.

"We're trying to alleviate information overload for any biomedical scientist who has to keep track of a complicated subject by reading the literature," says Burns, "which is everyone."

Burns aims at making it possible for a researcher to quickly find out what data exists, and to enable the researcher to retrieve and query the data from multiple directions. ISI computer scientist and natural language/ knowledge structure expert Eduard Hovy collaborates as BKEG co-PI.