The establishment of the Network of Excellence (NOE) ‘SemanticMining’ is in response to challenges expressed in the Workprogramme of Information Society Technologies, particularly the strategic objectives of Semantic-based Knowledge Systems (IST-2002-2.3.1.7), eHealth (IST-2002-2.3.1.11) and Bioinformatics in the Life Sciences Workprogramme (LIFESCIHEALTH-1.1.4).
The general objective of the NOE instrument (Network of Excellence) is to bridge gaps in the European research infrastructure and to facilitate cross-fertilisation between scientific disciplines. Traditionally academic departments in the domain of interest in this application – namely medical and biomedical informatics – have their roots either in computer science, systems engineering (including a variety of engineering disciplines) or in a medical or clinical context. There are, however, important research areas where the overlap in terms of projects and persons still falls short of what would be desirable, for example between the fields of formal ontologies and computational linguistics on the one hand, and clinical and biomedical informatics on the other. The proposed network is composed of partners from these disciplines, all bringing their experience and expertise together into a joint framework.
The network will specifically contribute to current efforts in the fields of medical informatics and bioinformatics to develop generic methods and tools for managing and interpreting the vast amount of digital data produced by the health care system and by biotechnological laboratories. The network will contribute to the bridging of gaps between so-called clinical and pre-clinical information on the one hand and the development of technological platforms for managing the results of evidence-based medicine on the other, taking full advantage of the potential of the information- and knowledge-based services offered by current technology.