Introduction

BLAH (Biomedical Linked Annotation Hackathon) series is organized to promote collaboration for sharing and linking resources for biomedical literature annotation and mining. Here, interested resources include corpora, annotation datasets, databases, software tools and services, terminologies, ontologies, graphics, movies, and so on. However, we hope they are all to be linked each other, particularly through literature, as literature for long time has played a central role for publication of scientific discoveries.

As a hackathon event, we are going to pay our efforts to implement things: each participant is encouraged to come with resources to share and to make links to other resources. Through collaboration during day time, those resources will become more available to the public in a interlinked way. During night time, a venue for creative discussions will be organized, which sometimes bring brilliant ideas. We solicit participation of researchers, engineers, and practitioners, who are interested in sharing and linking resources for biomedical literature mining.

"Shared Tasks" as the special theme

For long time, manually annotated corpora have played a central role, as benchmark data, for development and evaluation of biomedical text mining systems. Due to the variety and complexity of text mining needs, however, evaluation is sometimes not straightforward even when a benchmark data set exists. Sometimes, It leads to misuse of the annotation, which may result in misleading conclusions. Often, the purpose of an annotation data set becomes clear by being coupled with a specific evaluation logic, or tools. Therefore, here, in the context of text mining, we define a shared task to be an annotated corpus that is coupled with a specific evaluation logic or evaluation tools. By sharing annotated corpora in the form of shared tasks, we believe those annotation data sets can be correctly used more often. With the background, we set "shared tasks" as the special theme of BLAH5, and encourage potential participants to consider their contribution to that direction.