Digital reviews in molecular biology: approaches to structured digital publication

It is widely appreciated that it is no longer possible for biomedical research scientists to keep up with as much of what is published in their field as they ought. One solution to this problem is to increase the efficiency of information use by moving away from the classical browsing model for scientific information dissemination towards an information on demand model which would allow researchers to access information quickly and efficiently only as they need it. The most common approach to this goal has been to use information retrieval technology to improve access to text databases of biomedical information. We are interested in exploring an alternative; encoding this information for storage in structured databases for efficient retrieval.

Two small databases described here are test beds for development of structured digital publication software; the Tumor Gene Database, containing information about genes which are the sites for cancer-causing mutations, and the Mammary Transgene Database, containing information about expression of transgenes in agriculturally important animals. Both have been successfully searched by users and edited by curators via the World Wide Web.