MyMiner: A web application for computer-assisted biocuration and text annotation

Motivation: The exponential growth of scientific literature has resulted in a massive amount of unstructured natural language data that cannot be directly handled by means of bioinformatics tools. Such tools generally require structured data, often generated through a cumbersome process of manual literature curation. Herein, we present MyMiner, a free and user-friendly text annotation tool aimed to assist in carrying out the main biocuration tasks and to provide labelled data for the development of text mining systems. MyMiner allows easy classification and labelling of textual data according to user-specified classes as well as predefined biological entities. The usefulness and efficiency of this application have been tested for a range of real-life annotation scenarios of various research topics. © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.