GoWeb: A semantic search engine for the life

science web

Heiko Dietze, Michael Schroeder

Bioinformatics, BIOTEC, TU-Dresden Germany

{heiko.dietze,ms}@biotec.tu-dresden.de

Abstract. Background: Current search engines are keyword-based. Se-

mantic technologies promise a next generation of semantic search en-
gines, which will be able to answer questions. Current approaches either
apply natural language processing to unstructured text or they assume
the existence of structured statements over which they can reason.
Results: Here, we introduce a third approach, GoWeb, which combines
classical keyword-based Web search with text-mining and ontologies to
navigate large results sets and facilitate question answering. We evalu-
ate GoWeb on three benchmarks of questions on genes and functions, on
symptoms and diseases, and on proteins and diseases. The first bench-
mark is based on the BioCreAtivE 1 Task 2 and links 457 gene names
with 1352 functions. GoWeb finds 58% of the functional GeneOntology
annotations. The second benchmark is based on 26 case reports and links
symptoms with diseases. GoWeb achieves 77% success rate improving an
existing approach by nearly 20%. The third benchmark is based on 28
questions in the TREC genomics challenge and links proteins to diseases.
GoWeb achieves a success rate of 79%.
Conclusion: GoWeb’s combination of classical Web search with text-
mining and ontologies is a first step towards answering questions in the
biomedical domain. GoWeb is online at: www.gopubmed.org/goweb

1 Background
With the tremendous growth of the World Wide Web, search engines became key
tools to find documents. Search engines retrieve documents for a user’s keywords
from a large index and rank them by various criteria. While such keyword-based
search is fast and powerful to retrieve single documents, it is far from the vision
of answering a user’s questions by “understanding” the user’s query and answers
in the documents as put forward already in the late 1960s [1].
Consider e.g. a biomedical researcher, who might ask questions such as the
following: Which model organisms are used to study the Fgf8 protein? Which
processes are osteoclasts involved in? What are common histone modifications?
Which diseases are associated with wnt signaling? Which functions does Rag
C have? Which disease can be linked to fever, anterior mediastinal mass, and
central necrosis? What is the role of PrnP in mad cow disease?
The Web holds answers to these questions, but classical keyword-based search
is not suitable to answer them, since the keywords are required to appear literally
in text. However, documents do contain statements such as e.g. “wnt signalling
is linked to cancer” or “we studied fgf8 expression in Zebrafish development”. If
there is background knowledge that cancer is a disease and that zebrafish is a
model organism, then the above questions can be answered.
The use of such knowledge is at the heart of the semantic web, which pro-
motes the use of formal statements and reasoning to deliver advanced services
not available on the Web now [2]. To facilitate machine-readability and knowl-
edge processing, a set of standards, query languages, and the semantic stack
was proposed by the W3C. The stack comprises at the base unique identifiers
and XML as common markup language. On top of XML, it defines the Re-
source Description Framework, RDF to capture subject-predicate-object triples.
Furthermore, there is the modelling language RDFS and the query language
SPARQL. The basic class definitions and triples of RDF are extended at the
next level by the Web ontology language OWL, which provides description logic
as modelling language and by a rule layer [3].
Besides the expressiveness of OWL, mark up for vocabularies and meta-data
emerged such as Simple Knowledge Organisation Systems (SKOS) [4], Dublin
Core1 , Friend of a Friend (FOAF) [5] and the Semantically-Interlinked Online
Communities Project (SIOC) [6]. Additionally, there are formats to embed se-
mantic annotations within web documents, such as embedded RDF (eRDF),
Microformats2 or RDFa [7].
All of the above standards serve the need to formally represent knowledge
and facilitate reasoning over this knowledge. They require explicit statements
of knowledge. As a consequence, the amount of such structured data is still
small in comparison to the unstructured data. Thus, to support semantic search
there are essentially two approaches: Those, searching structured documents and
reasoning over them and those, searching unstructured documents and extracting
knowledge and reasoning over it. The knowledge extraction step of the latter uses
combinations of natural language processing, information retrieval, text-mining,
and ontologies for the knowledge extraction.
Table 1 summarises a number of semantic search engines, which work on
structured and unstructured documents. The former comprise Swoogle [8], Se-
mantic Web Search Engine (SWSE) [9], WikiDB [10], Sindice [11], Watson [12],
Falcons [13], and CORESE [14]. They include existing RDF repositories and
crawl the internet for formal statements, e.g. OWL files. A search retrieves a
list of results with URIs. For SWSE and Falcon the result is enriched with a
description and a filtering mechanism for result types. CORESE uses concep-
tual graphs for matching a query to its databases. WikiDB is slightly different
from the others in that it extracts formal knowledge implicit in meta tags of
Wikipedia pages and converts it into RDF offering querying with SPARQL.
As mentioned, the above systems are limited by the availability of structured
documents, a problem addressed by approaches such as the semantic media wiki
[15] and large efforts such as Freebase [16], which provides an environment to
1
dublincore.org
2
microformats.org
 Table 1. Comparison of semantic search engines

ontologies (1) implicit through RDF, (2) GO, (3) MeSH

textmining (4) NLP, (5) label extraction, (6) Ontology terminology,
(7) biomedical entities, (8) Wikipedia terminology
type of (9) RDF related, (10) web pages, (11) snippets, (12) abstracts,
documents (13) fulltext
clustering of (14) RDF types, (15) extracted categories, (16) textual labels, (17) on-
results tology, (18) answers, (19) query aspects
result type (20) RDF resource, (21) extracted text, (22) answer, (23) snippet, (24)
sentence, (25) fulltext, (26) cluster, (27) induced ontology, (28) abstract
unstructured

clustering of

scientifically
highlighting
structured/

textmining

result type
documents

documents
number of
ontologies

evaluated
Semantic

Engines

type of
Search

results
Swoogle rdf 1 Mio 9 20 yes
SWSE rdf 1 Mio 9 14 20 yes
Sindice rdf 1 Mio 9 20 yes
Watson rdf 1 Mio 9 20 yes
Falcons rdf 1 Mio 9 14 20 yes yes
CORESE rdf 1 Mio 9 20 yes
WikiDB rdf 1 Mio 9 20
Hakia txt 4 Bio 10 15 21 yes
START txt 4 Bio 10 22 yes
Ask.com txt 4 Bio 10 23
BrainBoost txt 4 Bio 10 24 yes
AnswerBus txt 4 Bio 10 25 yes
Cuil txt 4,8 Bio 10 15 21 yes
Clusty txt 5 Bio 10 16 23,26 yes
Carrot txt 5 Bio 11 16 23,26 yes yes
PowerSet wiki 4,8 Mio 10 15 23,25 yes
QuAliM wiki/txt 4,8 Mio 11,10 22 yes
GoWeb txt 2,3 6,7,8 Bio 11 17 23,27 yes yes
askMedline xml 3 Mio 12 28 yes
EAGLi xml 2 4,6 Mio 12 18 22,28 yes yes
GoPubMed xml 2,3 6,7,8 Mio 12 17 23,27,28 yes yes
ClusterMed xml 3 5 Mio 12 16 26,28 yes yes
IHop xml 3 6,7 Mio 12 19 24,28 yes yes
EBIMed xml 2,3 6,7 Mio 12 17 24,27 yes yes
XplorMed xml 3 5,6 Mio 12 17 21,28 yes yes
Textpresso xml 2 6 Mio 13 17 28 yes yes
Chilibot xml 7 Mio 12 24 yes yes
author formal statements. The second class of tools works on unstructured text
and therefore does not suffer from this limit. The systems can be distinguished
by the document source they work on (Web, Biomedical, Wiki), the use of back-
ground knowledge in the form of ontologies, the use of text-mining techniques
such as stemming, concept identification, deep/shallow parsing.
Hakia, START [17], Ask.com, BrainBoost (Answers.com), AnswerBus [18],
Cuil3 , Clusty4 , and Carrot5 are engines that work on Web documents. Hakia,
START and AnswerBus use natural language processing to understand docu-
ments, while Cuil, Clusty and Carrot cluster search results and aim to label
clusters with phrases, which are offered as related queries. Cuil, Clusty and Car-
rot are not semantic search engines in a strict sense, since these phrases are
not part of an ontology or vocabulary. However, they do have the benefit of be-
ing generally applicable and Cuil offers definitions for phrases where available.
Ask.com uses its ExpertRank, an algorithm for computing query-specific com-
munities and ranking in real-time, to identify relevant pages [19]. They include
structured knowledge to generate answers. BrainBoost is a meta-search engine.
It uses the proprietary AnswerRank algorithm applying machine learning and
natural language processing. It ranks answers extracted from the top websites.
Wikipedia is a valuable resource to answer questions and hence some engines
are specifically applied to it. PowerSet applies e.g. natural language processing
to Wiki in a similar manner to Hakia. QuAliM [20] uses a pattern based ap-
proach for sentence analysis. Semantic type checking for answers and a fallback
mechanism with web search is implemented in QuAliM.
The above tools are intended to be general and as a result they generally do
not cover the biomedical domain well. Searching for example for a protein such
as Fgf8, PowerSet and Hakia do not offer an answer for model organisms. They
offer information on the protein, but are not able to find zebrafish as a model
organism.
Engines such as askMedline, EAGLi [21], GoPubMed [22], ClusterMed, IHOP
[23], EBIMed [24], XplorMed [25], Textpresso [26] and Chilibot [27] address this
by processing biomedical literature in full text (Textpresso) or abstracts as avail-
able in the PubMed literature database. With a focused domain, these engines
can use background knowledge. GoPubMed and EBIMed use e.g. the GeneOntol-
ogy and the Medical Subject Headings, MeSH; XplorMed filters by eight MeSH
categories and extracts topic keywords co-occurrences; Chilibot extracts rela-
tions and generates hypotheses; IHOP uses genes and proteins as hyperlinks
between sentences and abstracts; EAGli and askMedline process questions as
input for the search.
Finally, besides all of the automated approaches, Google, Yahoo! and Mi-
crosoft use humans to answer questions in their services Google Answers, Yahoo!
Answers and MSN Live Search QnA.

3
www.cuil.com
4
clusty.com
5
www.carrot-search.com
 Closely related to semantic search, is semantic hyperlinking as implemented
in the Conceptual Open Hypermedia Service (COHSE). COHSE annotates a
given web page with concepts and offers services based on the identified concepts
([19], [20]).
None of the above systems combines the simplicity of keyword search on
the vast amounts of Web documents with the use of biomedical background
knowledge to filter large keyword results with biomedical ontologies. Here, we
address this by introducing the GoWeb search engine. GoWeb issues queries to
Yahoo and indexes the snippets semantically with ontology terms. These are then
offered to filter results by concepts. In order to demonstrate the power of this
approach in question answering, we evaluate GoWeb on three benchmarks with
questions on gene/function, symptom/disease, and protein/disease relationships
and compare it to existing solutions.

2 Algorithm and Architecture

GoWeb is an internet search engine based on ontological background knowl-
edge. It helps to filter potentially long lists of search results according to the
categories provided by the GeneOntology (GO) [28] and the Medical Subject
Headings (MeSH). With GoWeb one can use the GoPubMed [22] features to-
gether with the wide range of information sources available in the internet. It
offers an efficient search and result set filtering mechanism, highlighting and
semi-automatic question answering with the ontological background knowledge.
To facilitate the easy usage of GoWeb, the website is structured in three
panels. Please consider figure 1, a screen shot of the GoWeb web page. The
left panel contains the background knowledge and other retrieved meta-data.
For quicker navigation the panel is organized in the four categories what, who,
where, when (4w panel). The top-right panel holds the query field (search panel).
In the third panel below the input field, the actual search results are presented
(document panel).
The semantic filters of GoWeb are presented in the 4w panel. The what cat-
egory contains the result tree for the ontological background knowledge. It uses
a tree representation for relations between the ontology concepts of background
knowledge. In this way a concept in the tree represents the concept itself and its
children. Thus, allowing the user to select relevant concepts with one click.
The who panel contains filters related to persons, companies or institutions.
In the where panel there are filters related to locations, such as cities, countries
and similar. The when category assists with time related filters, e.g. a date.

2.1 Algorithm
The search is executed by a traditional keyword based search service. We use
Yahoo! Search BOSS service6 . The result of a submitted search is a list of tex-
tual summaries for web documents, called snippets. Next, GoWeb uses entity
6
developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/
Fig. 1. GoWeb screen shot, shown with example query Fgf8. On the left are the semantic filters. On the right side are the search results,
with the query field and summary on top.
recognition techniques to map concepts from the background knowledge to the
snippets.
The algorithm for the identification of ontological concepts in text is based
on the GoPubMed algorithms [22]. For the identification of protein and gene
names we use the approach by Hakenberg et al. [29], which achieved the best
results in the gene identification task of BioCreAtIvE 2 (Critical Assessment
of Information Extraction systems in Biology) in the year 2007. Further entity
recognition services can be integrated into GoWeb. Currently the OpenCalais
service [30] is used to identify names and places.
The identified entities of each result and found keywords are the basis for a
co-occurrence based semantic filtering mechanism of GoWeb. The filter uses the
part-of and is-a relationships from GO and the tree structure of MeSH. These
relations are used to induce the relevant search result for each concept from the
background knowledge. The induction result for all search results for a query is
also used to select important concepts. These top concepts are selected for the
entire background knowledge and for each sub category.

2.2 Architecture

The workflow for GoWeb can be described as follows. The user submits a query
through the search form on the GoWeb website to the server. The server pre-
processes the query and sends a search request to the search service. The search
service returns the first results. The first results are then annotated, highlighted
(concepts and keywords), rendered and sent to the user.
The user can now already browse the first results. Once the first results are
processed, the server starts fetching the remaining results. This is done for up
to 1000 results. Then all fetched results are annotated. To reduce the response
time, the fetching and annotation of results is done in parallel. The annotation
information is then used to induce a tree representation and top concepts of
the ontological background knowledge for the submitted query (result tree).
Then this information is rendered and sent to the user-interface using AJAX
technologies like JSON to reduce the required time and bandwidth. An overview
is available in Figure 2.
If the user selects a concept in the result tree by clicking it, a request is made
to update the presented documents. This includes a filtering step of the result
set and a re-ranking step. For an illustration see also Figure 3. The new ranking
is based on the found concepts, keywords and the original ranking.
Once the user has decided to open a web page, GoWeb offers to highlight the
page with the keywords and concepts from the background knowledge. This is
done with a proxy-based solution. The server checks if this page is annotatable,
e.g. the content is HTML based. Then the GoWeb-server fetches the site and
analyzes the content, adds the annotations and sends the result to the user. If
the content is not processable by the proxy there is an automatic forward to the
original content.
Fig. 2. General workflow for GoWeb showing the main components and the interactions
between the external services.

Fig. 3. Workflow for a request containing a concept selected from the result tree in the
user browser.
3 Results
The goal of GoWeb is to use ontologies and text-mining in semantic web search
to answer questions. Here, we give some examples and evaluate the question
answering capabilities of GoWeb on three benchmarks. In the introduction we
raised questions such as the following: Which model organisms are used to study
the Fgf8 protein? Which processes are osteoclasts involved in? What are common
histone modifications? Which diseases are associated with wnt signaling?
An answer to these questions can be found using GoWeb. For example Fgf8 is
studied in Mice, Zebrafish; osteoclasts are involved in bone resorption; common
histone modifications are Methylation and Acetylation and the wnt signaling
pathway is associated with neoplasms like breast cancer, tumors or leukemia.
The answers where directly obtained with GoWeb using simple keyword searches
and the induced background knowledge. For example the answer to the first
question can be found in the following way: first submit the query Fgf8 the
answer is directly shown as listed concepts in the organism’s part of the back-
ground knowledge (see also Figure 1). To retrieve the corresponding search re-
sults click on the organism. This simple strategy can be generalised to support
semi-automatic question answering. Next, we will demonstrate this using three
independent benchmarks.

3.1 Genes and Functions

The first benchmark is based on the association of Genes and their functions.
The BioCreAtIvE 1 (Task 2)[31] was a competition for text-mining algorithms to
find functional annotations in the form of GeneOntology (GO) concepts for genes
in a given full-text corpus. This task is a key problem for annotators of many
databases and a key question for biologists encountering a novel gene/protein,
they are not familiar with.
The test set for GoWeb now contains all GO annotations and genes from
the competition, which were labeled as identified with high confidence in the
results. This yields a list of 457 gene names with a total of 1352 GO concepts.
For example for “Rag C” there are 10 annotations: cytoplasm, small GTPase
mediated signal transduction, RNA splicing, transcription, GDP binding, protein
heterodimerization activity, small monomeric GTPase activity, heterotrimeric
G-protein complex, protein binding and nucleus.
For a test run GoWeb was given a gene name as query. Then it is checked if
the induced ontology tree contained the concepts corresponding to the expected
functional annotations for the gene. For all 457 submitted names the search
returned documents and the GoWeb system could identify GO concepts from
these snippets. The results show that for 58.1% (785 of 1352) of the benchmark
concepts are contained in the tree (recall).

3.2 Symptoms and Diseases

The second benchmark demonstrates the capabilities of GoWeb concerning the
association of symptoms and diseases as carried out by general practitioners and
medical researchers. It is based on the study by Tang et al. [32], who used a set
of 26 diagnostic cases published in the case records of the New England Journal
of Medicine. The symptoms were used as keywords for the search. From the
search results, they proposed a possible diagnosis. For example for the symptoms
“fever, anterior mediastinal mass and central necrosis”, they expected to find
the diagnosis “Lymphoma”. With their Google-based approach the proposed
diagnosis was for 15 out of 26 (58%) cases correct. It also has to be remarked,
that Tang et al. is a controversial [33–35] article. One of the main issues was a
possible wrong impression to the patients. It has to be clear that a search can
not replace the professional and trained diagnostic capabilities of a physician.
Especially in the medical domain web search results have to be handled with
careful considerations.
In the experimental setup for GoWeb the same keywords as in the original
paper, where used. Each diagnosis has been mapped to the corresponding MeSH
concept, if possible. Then in the experiment a query was given to the GoWeb
system and the resulting induced background knowledge tree was evaluated.
As an additional comparison for GoWeb we also applied this benchmark and
experimental setup to the GoPubMed system [22].
GoWeb can provide the correct answer in 20 out of 26 (77%) cases. In 10
of these cases, the answer term is found directly in the top categories of the
Diseases subtree of MeSH (see Table 4). The cases 8, 10 and 18 are not marked as
successful, although they mention the searched concepts. But they all find only
one article, the article[32] this analysis relies on. With GoPubMed an answer
could only be found in 13 cases. GoPubMed searches only in scientific abstracts
and does not include web contents such as clinical trails, general health pages,
disease group pages, etc. For a comparative overview see Table 2.

Table 2. Comparison of Google, GoPubMed and GoWeb for symptoms and diseases
benchmark

Case 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 15 16 17 18 19 22 25
√ √ √ √ √ √ √ √
Google
√ √ √ √ √ √ √
GoPubMed
√ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √
GoWeb

Case 26 27 28 29 30 31 33 34 36 37 Count Ratio

√ √ √ √ √ √ √ √
Google 16 62%
√ √ √ √ √ √
GoPubMed 13 50%
√ √ √ √ √ √ √ √
GoWeb 20 77%

For example for the case study number 28 GoWeb finds 126 articles for the
query “ANCA haematuria haemoptysis”. Under diseases one can find the MeSH
concept “Churg-Strauss Syndrome”. A click on the concepts in the tree retrieves
three snippets containing the concept. The resulting snippets are:

– Laboratory imposed restrictions on ANCA testing – 63 (5): 594 –

Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases
The laboratory has performed ANCA testing only when the request form
indicated . . . haematuria (requests from the renal/transplant unit), Churg-
Strauss syndrome, . . .
ard.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/63/5/594
– include haemoptysis (13% of patients), cystic bone lesions (4-20% of . . . Some
70-75% of patients with Churg-Strauss syndrome have ANCA . . .
www.hospitaldoctor.ie/hospital doctor/pdfs/HOS DOC MARCH APRIL 05.pdf
– Churg-Strauss Syndrome - Patient UK
Pulmonary: asthma, pneumonitis and haemoptysis . . . patients are perinuclear-
ANCA (p-ANCA) positive (antimyeloperoxidase antibodies) . . .
www.patient.co.uk/showdoc/40024815/

The GoWeb system performs better than GoPubMed because the underlying
search engine has a larger repository of documents. Additionally, it can also
index the full text, if it is available on the web. The MEDLINE search for all
PubMed based search engines, like GoPubMed, is only based on abstracts. This
corresponds with the fact that the MEDLINE search returns often none or only
one article abstract.

3.3 Proteins, Diseases and Evidences

Linking proteins and disease is a key task for many molecular biomedical re-
searchers. The third benchmark for GoWeb is based on the questions from the
TREC Genomics Track 2006[36]. The results of TREC Genomics Track 2006
comprise a benchmark that focused on passage retrieval for question answering.
It is based on full-text documents from the biomedical literature. For the year
2006 there were 28 questions. With GoWeb one can answer 22 of these 28 ques-
tions (78,6%). In 13 of these cases the semantic filter helped to reduce the result
set. For a summary of all questions please have a look at Table 3.
For GoWeb the questions were transformed into keywords. The complete
listing of questions and keywords is available in Table 5. A question was marked
as successfully handled, if there was a snippet that contained a valid answer.
The second aspect addressed with this benchmark was to show the capabilities
of the filtering feature. Filtering by background knowledge helps to reduce large
results to a smaller set of relevant documents. It was marked as applied, if the
answers, where found by using the filtering feature.
The answers for the first four questions (160–164) are shown in Table 6. They
also demonstrate what kind of textual evidence GoWeb can provide as answers.
The answer to question 160 (What is the role of PrnP in mad cow disease), for
instance, was found by submitting the keywords and selecting the MeSH concept
“Encephalopathy, Bovine Spongiform” (mad cow disease is a synonymous label
 Table 3. Summary of TREC Genomics 2006 answering capabilities of GoWeb

Question 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169
√ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √
Answered
√ √ √ √ √
Filter
Question 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179
√ √ √ √ √ √
Answered
√ √ √
Filter
Question 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 Count
√ √ √ √ √ √
Answered 22
√ √ √ √ √
Filter 13

for the concept) as semantic filter. The selected answer was now in the first
part of the remaining relevant results. The given number 378 corresponds to the
original position. This demonstrates that without the filter this answer would not
have been found normally [37]. For the question 161 the keywords were specific
enough. This corresponds with the original rank of first and second position for
the answers.
There are two main reasons for GoWeb to not be able to find a answer for
all question in the benchmark. The first is that the question is too complex.
The answer is too long to be formulated in a sentence or snippet. For example
the question 171 contains actually two questions. The second reason is that the
question domain is not sufficiently modelled in the background knowledge. For
question 178, for instance, skin biology has no corresponding concept and is too
general to be mentioned directly in text.

4 Discussion and Comparison

The three used benchmarks provide a basis for the evaluation of GoWeb. They
demonstrate the power of the idea but also its limitations. The starting point
is the usage of snippets. This is already a limitation in terms of completeness.
Snippets can be seen as an abstraction. They try to summarize facts related to
the keywords. A snippet might be too short to contain very complex facts, some
information will be lost. But important information is more likely to be in the
snippet, because important facts are often near in the original text. Thus it is
more likely to be also contained in the snippet. The co-occurrence is used as
approximation for relation extraction. One advantage of using this simpler ap-
proach is the reduced computational complexity. A proper NLP based approach
would need more computational time. With GoWeb the complete annotation
for 1000 results can be done on-the-fly and still provides response time of a few
seconds.
If more information than the snippet is required, it is necessary to fetch
the web pages and analyze them. This could be done on runtime for the result
set or pre-calculated during a crawl of the internet. Both options have major
drawbacks. Fetching and analyzing of web pages on-the-fly is not feasible with the
requirement of a short response time. The crawling of the internet is possible, but
requires a significant amount of resources in terms of hardware and bandwidth to
keep the index up-to-date. This is demonstrated by the popular search engines.
Each of them uses several data and computing centers. Although the search
requests from the user are the main load, keeping the index up-to-date is an
important aspect. One advantage of a separate crawl is the chance to build a
semantically enhanced index. Such an enhanced index offers the option to include
concepts directly into the search and not as post-processing step like GoWeb.
To include all information from a web page will increase the recall. But it
would also increase the problem of false positives from matching errors or irrel-
evant parts. The false positives would also unnecessarily increase the size of an
index. With the option to pre-process the information, e.g. with topic recogni-
tion or disambiguation algorithms, this can be compensated. For a specialized
system with a limited number of documents and known document structure, a
semantic index might be a better solution than GoWeb.
The application of text mining for concept identification is important for
finding the relevant snippets in the search results. A simple keyword can not
easily replace the additional information from the background knowledge. This
includes synonymous labels and related concepts. For example for heart diseases
in MeSH there are over 570 related labels.
The types of questions handled best by GoWeb have to be transformable
into keywords and concepts. The answer provided by GoWeb will be either an
inferred concept or a sentence/short text extract in the snippet. These options
reduce the types of questions which can be answered by GoWeb. For example in
a question classification by Tomuro and Lytinen [38] GoWeb performs best with
questions of type definition (’What does X do?’), reference (’What’, ’Which’)
or entities (’Who’). But it can not answer question types like manner of action,
degree or interval (’how many’, ’how much’ or ’how long’, e.g. What percentage
of children are vaccinated?) and procedure (’how to’). For a medical question
taxonomy by Ely et al. [39], GoWeb works with questions related to diagnosis
branch but it fails for questions from the treatment branch (What are the options
for treatment of condition y in situation z?), management (What is the best way
to discuss or approach discussion of difficult issue x?) and nonclinical (What are
the legal considerations in situation y?).
In comparison to existing systems which are mainly focusing on searching
OWL and RDF content (e.g. Swoogle, SWSE) GoWeb covers a broader area.
Current RDF search engines cover millions of RDF statements, whereas the
internet search engines cover billions of websites. Unfortunately, most of the
information in websites is unstructured text. GoWeb tries to bridge the semantic
gap with the limited amount of available semantic annotations by employing
text-mining for extraction of ontology concepts from text. In a nutshell, GoWeb
exploits that keywords and ontology terms co-occurring in snippets are often
facts.
 Traditional search engines like Google have the coverage but they miss the
explicit usage of ontological background knowledge. They only present a long list
of results. This works very well for simple retrieval of documents, but has limits
for more complex task, e.g. answering questions. Here the semantic filtering with
concepts as in GoWeb helps to reduce the result list to relevant answers. If a
snippet does not contain the relevant terms, it is likely to be not relevant.
For other internet search based systems like Hakia or PowerSet the advan-
tage of GoWeb is its additional background knowledge for the biomedical do-
main. Only GoWeb combines the usage of the GeneOntology (GO), the Medical
Subject Heading (MeSH) and protein identification. A clustering of text labels
like Clusty or Carrot can not replace the structural knowledge of an ontology. In
comparison to PubMed-based systems GoWeb can index the additional resources
of full text articles on the web.
The search interface of GoWeb provides with the what-where-who-when cat-
egories a simple way to browse the results. Next to the actual search results
GoWeb offers also additional information like definitions of concepts or Wikipedia
links.
Together with the filtering mechanism to reduce the result set from 1000
possible results to a small number of relevant entries GoWeb offers powerful tool
for semantic search in the biomedical domain. Overall, the paper shows that
co-occurrences of keywords and ontology terms in lists of snippets are often ap-
proximating facts, which aid to answer questions. The simplicity of the approach
ensures scalability and speed, still achieving success rates of up to 80%.

Acknowledgments We kindly acknowledge the help and discussions from our

colleagues. In particular we would like to thank A. Doms and T. Wächter. For the
helpful disccussions about the implementation we acknowledge the GoPubMed
team from Transinsight, especially M. Alvers, L. Barrio-Alvers, J. Mönnich, C.
Plake, and M. Zschunke. This work was supported by the European Union for
the Sealife Project, Project Reference IST-2006-027269.

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Table 4. Overview of the GoWeb results for the symptoms and diseases benchmark.

Query GoWeb Count

5 Acute ”Aortic regurgitation” depression Tree: Endocarditis, Bacterial 7 (1000)
abscess
6 oesophageal cancer hiccup nausea vomiting Tree: Adenocarcinoma AND 2 (1000)
Intestinal Obstruction
7 hypertension ”adrenal mass” Top categories: Cushing Syn- 41 (1000)
drome
8 ”hip lesion” child no, bmj article 258
9 HRCT centrilobular nodule ”acute respira- Finds the case studies this 15
tory failure” analysis relies on
10 fever bilateral ”thigh pain” weakness no, bmj article 500
11 fever ”anterior mediastinal mass” central Top categories: Lymphoma 66 (323)
necrosis
12 multiple ”spinal tumors” ”skin tumors” Top categories: Neurofibro- 21 (240)
matoses
14 ”ulcerative colitis” ”blurred vision” fever Tree: Vascultits 2 (1000)
15 nephrotic syndrome ”Bence Jones” ventric- Top categories: Amyloidosis 20 (247)
ular failure
16 hypertension papilledema headache ”renal Tree: Pheochromocytoma 1 (31)
mass”
17 ”sickle cell” pulmonary infiltrates ”back Top5 snippet is ACS 1000
pain”
18 fibroma astrocytoma tumor leiomyoma sco- no, bmj article 1 (47)
liosis
19 pulmonary infiltrates ”cns lesion” OR no 87
”Central nervous system lesion”
22 CLL encephalitis Tree: West Nile Fever 3 (1000)
25 ”portal vein thrombosis” cancer Tree: Phlebitis 9 (1000)
26 ”cardiac arrest” exercise young top categories: Cardiomy- 22 (1000)
opathy, Hypertrophic
27 ataxia confusion insomnia death Tree: CJD 17 (1000)
28 ANCA haematuria haemoptysis Top categories: Churg- 3 (126)
Strauss Syndrome
29 myopathy neoplasia dysphagia rash perior- Top categories: Dermato- 4 (32)
bital swelling myositis
30 ”renal transplant” fever cat lymphadenopa- Top categories: Cat-Scratch 13 (322)
thy Disease
31 ”buttock rash” ”renal failure” edema no 120
33 polyps telangiectasia epistaxis anemia Top categories: Telangiecta- 33 (1000)
sia, Hereditary Hemorrhagic
34 ”bullous skin” ”respiratory failure” carba- Top categories: Epidermal 4 (25)
mazepine Necrolysis, Toxic
36 seizure confusion dysphasia lesions no 1000
37 cardiac arrest sleep Tree: Brugada Syndrome 3 (1000)
 Table 5. TREC Genomics 2006 questions and keywords.

160 What is the role of PrnP in mad cow disease? PrnP

161 What is the role of IDE in Alzheimer’s disease? IDE Alzheimer
162 What is the role of MMS2 in cancer? MMS2
163 What is the role of APC (adenomatous polyposis coli) in colonAPC adenomatous
cancer? polyposis coli
164 What is the role of Nurr-77 in Parkinson’s disease? Nurr-77
165 How do Cathepsin D (CTSD) and apolipoprotein E (ApoE) “Cathepsin D”
interactions contribute to Alzheimer’s disease? “apolipoprotein E”
166 What is the role of Transforming growth factor-beta1 (TGF- TGF-beta1 cerebral
beta1) in cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA)? amyloid angiopathy
167 How does nucleoside diphosphate kinase (NM23) contribute NM23 tumor
to tumor progression? progression
168 How does BARD1 regulate BRCA1 activity? BARD1 BRCA1
169 How does APC (adenomatous polyposis coli) protein affect adenomatous
actin assembly? polyposis coli actin
assembly
170 How does COP2 contribute to CFTR export from the endo- COP2 CFTR
plasmic reticulum?
171 How does Nurr-77 delete T cells before they migrate to the Nurr-77 T cell
spleen or lymph nodes and how does this impact autoimmu-
nity?
172 How does p53 affect apoptosis? p53 apoptosis
173 How do alpha7 nicotinic receptor subunits affect ethanol alpha7 nicotinic
metabolism? receptor ethanol
174 How does BRCA1 ubiquitinating activity contribute to can- BRCA1
cer? ubiquitinating
175 How does L2 interact with L1 to form HPV11 viral capsids? L1 L2 HPV11
176 How does Sec61-mediated CFTR degradation contribute to Sec61 CFTR
cystic fibrosis?
177 How do Bop-Pes interactions affect cell growth? Bop Pes cell growth
178 How do interactions between insulin-like GFs and the insulin insulin-like GF
receptor affect skin biology? insulin receptor
179 How do interactions between HNF4 and COUP-TF1 suppress HNF4 COUP-TF1
liver function?
180 How do Ret-GDNF interactions affect liver development? Ret GDNF liver
181 How do mutations in the Huntingtin gene affect Huntington’s Huntingtin gene
disease?
182 How do mutations in Sonic Hedgehog genes affect develop- Sonic Hedgehog
mental disorders? gene
183 How do mutations in the NM23 gene affect tracheal develop- NM23 tracheal
ment? development
184 How do mutations in the Pes gene affect cell growth? Pes gene cell growth
185 How do mutations in the hypocretin receptor 2 gene affect hypocretin receptor
narcolepsy? 2 narcolepsy
186 How do mutations in the Presenilin-1 gene affect Alzheimer’s Presenilin-1
disease? Alzheimer
187 How do mutations in familial hemiplegic migraine type 1 FHM1 calcium
(FHM1) gene affect calcium ion influx in hippocampal neu- neuron
rons?
 Table 6. Answers for TREC Genomics 2006 questions 160 to 164.

Concept original Pos Evidence

160 Encephalopathy, 378: Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy Bovine spongiform encepalopathy (BSE)
Bovine Spongiform is a transmissible, . . . Mutations in the PRNP gene cause prion disease. . . .
www.answers.com/topic/spongiform-encephalopathy
161 1: Insulin-Degrading Enzyme as a Downstream Target of Insulin Receptor . . . ef-
fect relationship between insulin signaling and IDE upregulation. . . . P85) was
correlated with reduced IDE in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) brains and in . . .
alzheimer.neurology.ucla.edu/pubs/IDEzhao.pdf
2: Insulin degrading enzyme - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 1 IDE and Alzheimer’s Disease. 2
IDE Structure and Function. 3 References. 4 External links . . . between IDE, Aβ degradation,
and Alzheimer’s disease. . . . en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin degrading enzyme
162 DNA Damage 41: . . . concerted action of RAD5 with UBC13 and MMS2 in DNA damage repair is given
by . . . Finally, it is shown that MMS2, like UBC13 and many other repair genes, is . . .
db.yeastgenome.org/cgi-bin/reference/reference.pl?dbid=S000061270
163 1: The official name of this gene is ”adenomatous polyposis coli.” APC is the gene’s official symbol.
. . . adenomatous polyposis - caused by mutations in the APC . . . ghr.nlm.nih.gov/gene=apc
164 Parkinson Disease 40: The aetiology of idiopathic Parkinson’s disease Nurr 1 was first recognised as a transcription
factor that was primarily . . . Its close structural relation to Nur 77 led to its identification in
stimulated . . . www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1187126
132: Concise Review: Therapeutic Strategies for Parkinson Disease Based on . . . nu-
clear related receptor 1 (Nurr-1), thereby withdrawing the cells of the cell . . . in
the SVZ and the substantia nigra of the healthy adult rat brain [77, 98] . . .
stemcells.alphamedpress.org/cgi/content/full/25/2/263
221: Parkinson’s disease: piecing together a genetic jigsaw – Dekker et al . . . study
decreased rapidly with later onset: 77% of patients with onset of disease . . .
agenesis of mesencephalic dopaminergic neurons in Nurr-1 deficient mice. . . .
brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/126/8/1722