Biological and Chemical Text Mining

In text mining the bioinformatics community seems to be already ways ahead compared to the cheminformatics community. They have more tools, more experience, and newer technology (*schnief*, maybe they are smarter or just bigger). Beside are their services already up-and-running and not just ideas on a prototyping level. A very nice overview for biomedical, not medchemical, tools and publications can be found on the BLIMP portal.
Two recently added tools are BioText (via BioMed Central) and X:Map a genome browser for affymetrix exon arrays (via Pierre Lindenbaum). X:Map is not really a text mining tool, but still a nice piece of work.

Though there seems to be some progress in the cheminformatics field. Rich reported that some tools start adding (chemical) encoded structure information to (non-chemical) molecule images and Egon reported about more Optical Structure Recognition (OSR) tools. Lets hope that Rich is right ...

"The Wikipedia Chemistry/Structure Drawing Workgroup hints at what lies ahead for chemistry. Two tools, GChemPaint and ACD ChemSketch, now enable molecular structure information to be embedded in images." [Rich Apodaca]

... on the other hand, it can not get worse than it is already ... as long you do not compress the images or produce PDF files out of them.

Text Caption