Personal Agents for Easier Access of Biological Information

Abstract The explosive growth of online biological and medical information presents a real time challenge to the strategy and methods currently used in information acquisition. One of these challenges is how to retrieve the relevant information in a timely manner. Agent technology and various filtering systems have been employed in order to enhance the relevancy. Integration of the two into a user-friendly interface will further reduce the time spent in the process. In addition, personalization will provide extra relevancy to the retrieved information. Starting from a personalized PubMed search, we propose to apply the bottom-up strategy in our development of agents that are linked to a Personalized Domain-Specific Vocabulary (PDSV), which consists of major terms, sources and techniques by which a Molecular Oncologist search for the relevant information. The successful application of PDSV in online information retrieval (IR) in one research area will lay a foundation for future expansion into other health care research areas.