Report on COST 282 - Mission Ireland (19.02 - 25.02.2004)
Dr. Alexander K. Seewald

This short-term mission was motivated by common interests of ÖFAI and
the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Ulster. The
BioMinT project deals with information retrieval, information
extraction and text mining in life sciences, while the University
of Ulster has active Ph.D. projects in these and related areas (see
http://research.bioinformatics.ulster.ac.uk/).

Prof. Dubitzky, the head of the School of Biomedical Sciences, was
very interested in our project. He sees Text Mining as an important
part of Systems Biology, and currently edits a special issue of OMICS
(A Journal of Integrative Biology) on this subject. He has also arranged
a symposium on Knowledge Exploration in Life Science Informatics, where
we intend to submit a presentation.

Mr. Sturgeon, PhD student (M. in linguistics) from the School of
Biomedical Sciences, intends to start a PhD on subcellular localization
from literature. He has done work on information fusion, online databases
and microarray analysis; plus his background makes him an ideal source
of linguistic background knowledge. We have agreed to collaborate.

I have made contact Prof. Chris Shaw, an eminent biological researcher
with decades of clinical experience, who is somewhat interested in our
work. While he is very busy, his insight into the field is astounding and
has furthered my appreciation of major problems within Systems Biology.

Concluding, the mission was successful in making us mutually aware of
the focus of each other's work and in identifying possible modes of
cooperation and collaboration related to BioMinT's goals.

Acknowledgements: The short-term mission was financed by the European
Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research (COST),
Action 282, Knowledge Exploration in Science and Technology.