COVoc and COVTriage: novel resources to support literature triage


 
 
 Since early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has confronted the biomedical community with an unprecedented challenge. The rapid spread of COVID-19 and ease of transmission seen worldwide is due to increased population flow and international trade. Front-line medical care, treatment research and vaccine development also require rapid and informative interpretation of the literature and COVID-19 data produced around the world, with 177,500 papers published between January 2020 and November 2021, i.e., almost 8,500 papers per month.
 To extract knowledge and enable interoperability across resources, we developed the COVID-19 Vocabulary (COVoc), an application ontology related to research of this pandemic. The main objective of COVoc development was to enable seamless navigation from biomedical literature to core databases and tools of ELIXIR, a European-wide intergovernmental organisation for life sciences.
 
 
 
 This collaborative work provided data integration into SIB Literature services (SIBiLS), an application ontology (COVoc), and a triage service named COVTriage and based on annotation processing to search for COVID-related information across pre-defined aspects with daily updates.
 Thanks to its interoperability potential, COVoc lends itself to wider applications, hopefully through further connections with other novel COVID-19 ontologies as has been established with CIDO.
 
 
 
 https://github.com/EBISPOT/covoc, https://candy.hesge.ch/COVTriage
 
 
 
 Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
