OReFiL: an online resource finder for life sciences

Background: Many online resources for the life sciences have been developed and introduced in peer-reviewed papers recently, ranging from databases and web applications to data-analysis software. Some have been introduced in special journal issues or websites with a search function, but others remain scattered throughout the Internet and in the published literature. The searchable resources on these sites are collected and maintained manually and are therefore of higher quality than automatically updated sites, but also require more time and effort. Description: We developed an online resource search system called OReFiL to address these issues. We developed a crawler to gather all of the web pages whose URLs appear in MEDLINE s and full-text papers on the BioMed Central open-access journals. The URLs were extracted using regular expressions and rules based on our heuristic knowledge. We then indexed the online resources to facilitate their retrieval and comparison by researchers. Bec...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Yasunori Yamamoto, Toshihisa Takagi
• Keywords: BMCBI 2007, Corresponding Pubmed Entry, Life Science, Online Resources