last update : July 2012

Objectives:

• To organize events, such as workshops and conferences dedicated to NLP (Natu¬ral Language Processing) and related fields (semantics, information retrieval, text mining…) applied to the bio-medical domain in a broad sense;
• Networking with persons and societies involved in natural language processing and text mining in the medical do¬main, especially in Europe, and to learn about their current developments and activities. To develop connections with experts in NLP applied to unrestricted domains and to participate to related events;
• To represent EFMI at IMIA WG6, at AIME, as well as in biomedical and molecular biology forums (e.g. ISMB, International Society for BioCuration) and to lobby to promote EFMI’s expertise to standards and policy-makers (WHO, IHE-Europe, National Library and Medicine, ECDC, European Union) by for instance by helping to prepare strategic research agenda of research funding agencies;
• To develop and maintain capacity services in the field of biomedical natural language processing, text mining and information retrieval; in particular to bridge the gap between bio- and medical informatics.

Recent activities:

• WG NLU has established connections with leading EU initiatives in the do¬main of analysis of Clinical Reports using text analytical instruments, such as DebugIT (http://www.debugit.eu/)
• WG NLU has established connections with leading EU initiatives in the do¬main of terminology-drien semantic interoperability, in particular epSOS (http://epsos.eu), which the e-Health flagship project in the field;
• Various capacity and infrastructures services, regularly maintained by the NLU working group, have been launched and/or updated (new MEDLINE baseline for the EAGLi bio-medical question-answering engine: http://eagl.unige.ch/EAGLi/ ; new release of SNOMED for the SNOCat medical coding tool: http://eagl.unige.ch/SNOCat/ ; the Knowledge Authoring and Refinement Tool for Infectious Diseases: http://eagl.unige.ch/KART/; the list of services is available on the Bibliomics and Text Mining (BiTeM) resource pages on http://bitem.hesge.ch/list-resources;
• During the previous MIE conference, the WG co-organized a workshop on “From an ontology framework standard to terminologies” (University of Saint Etienne, INSERM, WHO collaborating center for International Classifications in French Language, Royal College of Nursing of United Kingdom, University of Sydney WHO-FIC network, The Catholic University of Korea,Seoul,Korea), chaired by J.-M. Rodrigue; the WG also participated in the DebugIT’s village of the future event;
• In December 2011, members of the WG were invited to participate in Swiss-funded evaluation of EU e-Health policies with the support of the BAG (Bundesamt fur Gesundheit)
• In March 2012, the UniMed resource (http://research.isb-sib.ch/unimed/), which aimed at bridging the gap between genotypic and phenotypic description of genetic pathologies has been updated;

Future activities:

• The WG is actively looking for any opportunity of organizing a dedicated track in a future EFMI STC conference, with call for papers, peer reviewing and publication of the best papers in an International journal.

Chairs:
Patrick Ruch
Service d’Informatique Médicale
Hôpitaux Universitaires de Genève
CH-1211 GENEVA 14 Switzerland
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Robert Baud
Service d'Informatique Médicale
Hôpitaux Universitaires de Genève
CH-1211 GENEVA 14, Switzerland
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