The BioLINK SIG meeting has been regularly held in association with the ISMB conference since 2001, focusing on the development and application of resources and tools for biomedical text mining. The SIG is interdisciplinary in nature focusing on the community of users, including biomedical experimentalists, researchers and database curators, who are interested in using text mining methods as part of their tools.

The meeting includes invited talks, reports from recent evaluations and workshops, as well as a poster session. We will encourage posters with short abstracts presenting new/preliminary work, and dedicate some time to discussing them.

We are putting together a programme that will be relevant to text mining experts and the wider ISMB crowd. The workshop will include talks and panel discussions with experts in the biomedical field and industry to discuss their work and how they apply text mining to their advantage. The focus will be on relevant applications of text mining in the biomedical field like for example the use of text mining methods in interesting ways for high-throughput data analysis or drug repositioning. In addition we plan to invite a senior computational linguistics researchers to give a high-level perspective on the state of the art in natural language processing.

We anticipate a productive workshop that will facilitate discussion and exchange of ideas by bringing together multiple communities: the users of text mining tools, including curators of biological databases, bench scientists and bioinformaticians; and the researchers applying natural language processing, ontologies, text mining, image analysis, information extraction and retrieval to problems in the biomedical domain.

Information about last year's meeting is available at the BioLINK09 web site.