Ontology-based Retrieval of Bio-medical Information based on Microarray Text Corpora

Microarray technology is often used in gene expression experiments. Information retrieval in the context of microarrays has mainly been concerned with the analysis of the numeric data produced; however, the experiments are often annotated with textual metadata. Although biomedical resources are exponentially growing, the text corpora are sparse and inconsistent in spite of attempts to standardize the format. Ordinary keyword search may in some cases be insufficient to find relevant information and the potential benefit of using a semantic approach in this context has only been investigated to a limited degree. We explore the possibilities of retrieving biomedical information from microarrays in Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO), of which we have indexed a sample semantically, as a first step towards ontology based searches. Through an example we argue that it is possible to improve the retrieval of biological information.