Mining Medical Literature 2 Basics of Mining Medical Literature

A fairly clear distinction can be drawn between mining goals that fall under the ‘search’ category, and those that fall under ‘discover.’ Search can be described as a goal-oriented approach: you have an idea of what you are looking for -perhaps all genes related to a particular function – and wish to mine the available data sources for relevant information (the actual methods of mining will be explored later). Discover is a more open-ended approach, where, as the name implies, you embark on a journey where you examine a large amount of data or text to look for patterns, implied relationships that have not yet been explored, or other correlations that were not previously guessed at.