BioLog: A Browser Based Collaboration and Resource Navigation Assistant for BioMedical Researchers

We often realize that communicating with other colleagues who are studying similar topics helps to identify information relevant to our area of study, which otherwise may not have been found. We wish to accelerate acquisition of collective knowledge in a defined area by identifying specific spheres of inquiry. Such spheres correspond to groups of people who are experts in a field. In this paper we provide a systematic way to gain knowledge from their online search activity, and enable them to organize and share their search findings for further analysis. We have built a prototype system, BioLog, to help biomedical researchers share this implicit knowledge among their peers and store their access patterns into a central system for reuse. BioLog has been deployed it in two labs within TGen as a pilot study. The data has been gathered and analyzed by preliminary text-mining and collaborative filtering methods.