It has been a privilege to have recently been involved in an exciting new collaboration with Alexander Tropsha and Denis Fourches at the University of North Carolina. The team carried out a cheminformatics analysis of the assertional metadata (AMD) from BioWisdom’s Safety Intelligence Program (SIP), the world’s largest, ever-expanding collection of the known effects of drugs and other chemicals. SIP makes use of BioWisdom’s collection of key concept metadata and Sofia technology, which translates the varied and diverse language used by scientists into a semantically consistent form. The study has provided a fresh new perspective on historic public domain data, bringing together isolated fragments of toxicology information, spanning decades, to provide new insight into drug safety. The resulting article, entitled “Cheminformatics Analysis of Assertions Mined from Literature That Describe Drug-Induced Liver Injury in Different Species”, was published in Chemical Research in Toxicology on December 16, 2009.

Read more about Cheminformatics Breathes New Life Into Legacy Data »

I attended a virtual conference last week, hosted by the Drug Safety Executive Council (DSEC), on “Pre-GLP Safety Strategy Session: Key Areas to Address When Planning a Pre-GLP Safety Evaluation”. It was an excellent session, very well run with good moderators, and some excellent speakers.

Read more about Meeting report – DSEC Pre-GLP Safety Strategy »

We have recently come across a great online resource called wordle (http://www.wordle.net/) which makes some really appealing text clouds such as that shown above. The above cloud was generated by copying and pasting a page about metadata from Wikipedia, but you can also generate a cloud from website by pasting in a URL.  While it’s fun to use it to make pretty pictures it also provides a very useful summary of what a document or a website is all about.  Give it a try!

BioWisdom specializes in the application of ‘Intelligent Metadata’ to enhance the value of your data for your business. Key Concept Metadata (KCM) is used to annotate, translate and connect critical concepts expressed in structured and unstructured records. KCM can be used for Knowledge Discovery – text mining and enterprise search. KCM can be used for organising, categorising, filtering and channeling documents; for aligning and comparing key concepts such as assets and liabilities.

Read more about Intelligent Metadata »