A method for supporting retrieval of articles on protein structure analysis considering users’ intention

BACKGROUND: In recent years, information about protein structure and function is described in a large amount of articles. However, a naive full-text search by specific keywords often fails to find desired articles, because the articles involve the ambiguous and complicated concepts that cannot be described with uniform representation. For retrieving articles on protein structure and function, it is important to consider the relevance between structural and/or functional concepts by identifying the user’s intention. RESULTS: We introduce a scheme of evaluating relevance between articles based on various biological databases and ontologies on structures and functions of proteins. The relevance, which is defined as a path length between concepts on hierarchies, is modified adaptively based on additional articles as a query in order to reflect the user’s intention. Also we implemented the retrieval system, in which the user can input some articles as a query and the related articles are retrieved and displayed on the 2D map. CONCLUSIONS: The effectiveness of the proposed system was confirmed experimentally by having shown that the users can obtain easily highly related articles which reflect their intention.