Overview of BioCreative V BioC Track

BioC is a simple XML format for text, annotations and relations, and was developed to achieve interoperability for biomedical text processing. Following the success of BioC in BioCreative IV, the BioCreative V BioC track addressed a collaborative task to build an assistant tool for BioGRID curation. For this track, we divided the whole task into 8 different subtopics including gene/protein/organism named entity recognition and protein-protein/genetic interaction passage identification. A total of 9 teams participated in 7 tasks and the submitted runs were merged by using a machine learning classifier to produce optimized output. The curation tool was evaluated by 4 BioGRID curators in terms of practical usability. The feedback given by curators was positive overall due to the user-friendly design and an easy-to-use gene/protein curation tool. In this paper, we describe the framework of the collaborative BioC task and discuss preliminary findings based on the user survey.