A tagging system for bioinformatics resources

The evolution of information technologies in the life sciences research field has leveraged fast and widespread availability of biological data. To deal with this huge amount of data, multiple distinct information systems were developed, trying to process, organize, and make the knowledge from this data available for the scientific community. Moreover, the number of articles published online has been increasing dramatically. However, extracting information from all these resources is a very hard task. As such, new technical solutions are mandatory to simplify the human burden of keeping abreast of these achievements. This paper presents a biomedical annotation system that enriches textual data through the automatic tagging of specific concepts. The solution was developed following a software-as-a-service strategy and, relying on augmented browsing, can highlight terms in a web interface allowing direct access to additional information from external sources. With this system, users will be able to analyze, in more detail, any kind of textual document provided by common web-based applications.