A Method for Indexing Biomedical Resources over the Internet Guillermo DE LA CALLE a , Miguel GARCIA-REMESAL a and Victor MAOJO a a Biomedical Informatics Group, Artificial Intelligence Lab., Facultad de Informática, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Campus de Montegancedo s/n, 28660 Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, Spain Abstract. A large number of biomedical resources are publicly available over the Internet. This number grows every day. Biomedical researchers face the problem of locating, identifying and selecting the most appropriate resources according to their interests. Some resource indexes can be found in the Internet, but they only provide information and links related to resources created by the owner institution of each website. In this paper we propose a novel method for extracting information from the literature and create a Resourceome, i.e. an index of biomedical resources (databases, tools and services) in a semi-automatic way. In this approach we consider only the information provided by the abstracts of relevant papers in the area. Building a comprehensive resource index is the first step towards the development of new methodologies for the automatic or semi- automatic construction of complex biomedical workflows which allow combining several resources to obtain higher-level functionalities. Keywords. Data Acquisition, Data Capture, Classification, Indexing Introduction Over the last years, there has been a proliferation of biomedical resources, including databases, tools, and services. Many of these resources are publicly available over the Internet. They provide biomedical researchers with tools to facilitate different tasks, including, for instance, genetic sequence analysis and alignment, protein annotation or structural studies. As regards, there is a plethora of biomedical databases covering different areas including biomedical literature, genetic disorders, macromolecular structures or rare diseases. In this scenario, there is a need for novel tools to gather and organize all these resources. In most cases, the resources can be unknown to those researchers that may benefit from their use. This circumstance emphasizes the need for developing advanced tools to facilitate the localization and use of such resources. In order to disseminate and provide a unified access to these resources, it is required to build an index of existing biomedical resources. Such an index should not only contain information regarding the location, inputs, outputs and service invocation procedures, but also a complete semantic description of their functionalities. Currently, there is not such an index readily available to the biomedical community. eHealth Beyond the Horizon – Get IT There S.K. Andersen et al. (Eds.) IOS Press, 2008 © 2008 Organizing Committee of MIE 2008. All rights reserved. 163