Linking with BIAM: searching for drugs and pharmaceutical substances

The quantity of biomedical publications is growing at an exponential rate. With such explosive growth of the content, it is more and more difficult to locate, retrieve and manage the resulting information. This is why text mining has become a necessity. The main goal of biomedical research is to put knowledge to practical use in the form of diagnoses, prevention, and treatment. It is important to pool the resources between the different individuals researching results. The objective of this paper is to discuss the variety of issues and challenges surrounding the perspectives regarding the use of Information Retrieval and Text Mining methods in biomedicine. The article will first look at the directions in biomedical TM and then describe the work done for the BIAM project, the French on-line Medical Data Base.