Text mining tools for extracting information about microbial biodiversity in food

Information on food microbial diversity is scattered across millions of scientific papers. Researchers need tools to assist their bibliographic search in such large collections. Text mining and knowledge engineering methods are useful to automatically and efficiently find relevant information in Life Science. This work describes how the Alvis text mining platform has been applied to a large collection of PubMed abstracts of scientific papers in the food microbiology domain. The information targeted by our work is microorganisms, their habitats and phenotypes. Two knowledge resources, the NCBI taxonomy and the OntoBiotope ontology were used to detect this information in texts. The result of the text mining process was indexed and is presented through the AlvisIR Food on-line semantic search engine. In this paper, we also show through two illustrative examples the great potential of this new tool to assist in studies on ecological diversity and the origin of microbial presence in food.