A new project applies text-mining to help scientists in the UK discover knowledge in large collections of research articles and data (Found in: KurzweilAI):
Julie Nightingale
Tuesday January 10, 2006
The Guardian
Scientific research is being added to at an alarming rate: the Human Genome Project alone is generating enough documentation to "sink battleships". So it's not surprising that academics seeking data to support a new hypothesis are getting swamped with information overload. As data banks build up worldwide, and access gets easier through technology, it has become easier to overlook vital facts and figures that could bring about groundbreaking discoveries.The government's response has been to set up the National Centre for Text Mining, the world's first centre devoted to developing tools that can systematically analyse multiple research papers, abstracts and other documents, and then swiftly determine what they contain.
The article above also cites some recent discoveries that have been enabled by text-mining approaches:
The more breathtaking results have included the discovery of new therapeutic uses for the drug Thalidomide to treat conditions such as chronic hepatitis C and acute pancreatitis and that chlorpromazine may reduce cardiac hypertrophy - enlargement of the heart leading to heart failure.