BERST: An Engine and Tool for Exploring Biomedical Entities and Relationships

To facilitate the search of rapidly growing biomedical knowledge in literature, we developed a Biomedical entity-relationship search tool (BERST). It is also a biomedical knowledge integration framework, which presently contains six popular databases represented in terms of a network of concepts and relations extracted from these knowledge sources. Users search the integrated knowledge network by entering keywords, and BERST returns a sub-network matching and representing the keywords and their relationships. The resulting graph can be navigated interactively allowing users to explore specific paths between any two nodes representing potentially interesting relationships between them. A graphical UI was developed to provide a more intuitive and overall view of the information being searched and studied. BERST framework can be naturally expanded to integrate other biomedical knowledge sources. BERST is implemented as a Java web application.