Enhancing access to the Bibliome: the TREC Genomics Track

The growing amount of scientific discovery in genomics and related biomedical disciplines has led to a corresponding increase in the amount of on-line data and information. A new challenge for biomedical researchers has been how to access and manage this ever-increasing quantity of information. The Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) has implemented a Genomics Track to create an experimental environment for research in the use of information retrieval systems in the genomics domain. In the first year of the track, an ad hoc document retrieval task and an information extraction task were carried out by 29 research groups. Future work will focus on more complex data sources, searching tasks, and types of experiments.