=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2198/paper_99
|storemode=property
|title=SCAIView – A Semantic Search Engine for Biomedical Research Utilizing a Microservice Architecture
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2198/paper_99.pdf
|volume=Vol-2198
|authors=Jens Dörpinghaus,Jürgen Klein,Johannes Darms,Sumit Madan,Marc Jacobs
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/i-semantics/DorpinghausKDMJ18
}}
==SCAIView – A Semantic Search Engine for Biomedical Research Utilizing a Microservice Architecture==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2198/paper_99.pdf
SCAIView – A Semantic Search Engine for
Biomedical Research Utilizing a Microservice
Architecture
Jens Dörpinghaus12 , Jürgen Klein1 , Johannes Darms1 , Sumit Madan1 , and
Marc Jacobs1
1
Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing,
Schloss Birlinghoven, Sankt Augustin, Germany
2
jens.doerpinghaus@scai.fraunhofer.de
Abstract. Biological and medical researchers explore the mechanisms
of living organisms and tend to gain a better understanding of underly-
ing fundamental biological processes of life. To tackle such complex tasks
they constantly need to gather and accumulate new knowledge by per-
forming experiments and studying scientific literature. We will present
the novel semantic search engine ”SCAIView” for knowledge discovery
and retrieval and, additionally, discuss the most recent paradigm shifts in
communication technologies, which leads to a completely new architec-
ture that improves scalability, achieves better interoperability, and also
increases fault-tolerance.
1 Introduction
Biological and medical researchers are interested in exploring the mechanisms of
living organisms and gaining a better understanding of underlying fundamental
biological processes of life. To tackle such complex tasks they constantly gather
and accumulate new knowledge by performing experiments, and also studying
scientific literature that includes results of further experiments performed by
researchers. Existing solutions are mainly based on the methods of biomedical
text mining to extract key information from unstructured biomedical text (such
as publications, patents, and electronic health records).
Especially in the field of biomedical sciences, we have a long history of
developing applications that solve the above mentioned tasks. For instance,
SCAIView3 is an information retrieval system that allows semantic searches
in large textual collections by combining free text searches with the ontological
representations of automatic recognized biological entities (see Hodapp et al.
[5]). SCAIView was used in many recent research projects, for example regard-
ing neurodegenerative diseases [4] or brain imaging features [6]. Furthermore, it
was also used for document classification and clustering [3]. Another important
3
https://www.scaiview.com/ (an academia version is freely available at
http://academia.scaiview.com/academia/)
2 Dörpinghaus, Klein et al.
real-world task is the creation of biological knowledge graphs that is tackled by
the BELIEF environment [9]. It assists researchers during the curation process
by providing relationships extracted by automatic text mining solutions and rep-
resented in a human-readable form [10]. At the core of both technologies several
implementations of the methods of biomedical text mining are in place.
In this poster we will present the recent development of SCAIView, and how
SCAIView (as well as BELIEF) evolved using the same core technologies to an
interoperable software system.
2 SCAIView architecture
To keep up with the state-of-the-art technologies and to be prepared for inte-
gration of novel and game-changing developments, we migrated the SCAIView
ecosystem from a large monolith to microservice-based system. It allows us to
reuse parts for different purposes and the data itself can be easily processed,
shared and accessed. Additionally, the new system also allows us to focus on
FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles, introduced
in [11], that are becoming a standard in the biological scientific community.
The microservice infrastructure of SCAIView is an ecosystem of three main
services: Core, API, and Indexer (Figure 1), which communicate through the
message broker (Apache ActiveMQ). The core fulfills various important tasks
to persist, retrieve, and process data. Beside further text mining microservices,
there are also specialized microservices such as BEL Commons Professional,
which allows to validate text-mined biological entities and relationships, that are
shared by BELIEF and SCAIView ecosystems. SCAIView’s user interface itself is
a web-based microservice application running on Apache Tomcat communicating
via REST-API calls with the backend. The visualization of the document corpus
includes document elements that are stored and represented as semantic digital
assets (SDA) (Jacobs et al. [7]). The SDA represent various semantically-enriched
domain models that can be binary data like images or plain-text such as natural
language. The corpus itself is pre-processed and stored in a document store.
The Document Store is based on Apache Accumulo and Apache Solr. The
first one is used to persist raw results of the text mining pipelines. This allows us
to compare and validate the development of old and new text mining components
really fast, which is necessary in the research area. The latter one contains SDAs
such as the document text, recognized semantic concepts, and further metadata
that is needed for fast retrieval. SCAIView can also handle multiple text min-
ing and knowledge discovery pipelines by communicating through the message
broker. Common steps are the usage of a DocumentDecomposer, Lemmatizer,
JProMiner for named entity recognition. Other text processing components, such
as UIMA Ruta-based components (see [8]) or ChemoCR (see [12]) can be used
on demand and be easily integrated into processing pipelines.
Search queries and knowledge discovery in SCAIView is linked to ontology
and terminology data. Semantic searches are a combination of free text search
and entities represented in ontologies or terminologies. For instance, SCAIView
SCAIView 3
Fig. 1. The shared
architecture for the
semantic search
engine (SCAIView)
and the semi-
automatic knowl-
edge graph creation
environment (BE-
LIEF). It consists
of three different
layers: application,
microservice, and
data layer. The BEL
network-related
microservices are
called BEL Com-
mons Professional.
includes Alzheimer’s Disease Ontology (ADO), BioMarker terminology, drug
names, the Hypothesis Finder and many more. These resources are displayed
in a tree format and can be used to make detailed, faceted search queries and
to perform statistical analysis on the retrieved document corpus. The access to
these resources is provided by our internal-hosted OLS service (Ontology Lookup
Service [2]) and the upcoming TeMOwl (Terminology Management based on
OWL) service.
In general, SCAIView is developed to handle any kind of document corpus but
currently we focus on the biomedical research area. Therefore, as input we use
databases such as PubMed 2017 [1] that contains around 27 million abstracts and
PMC 20174 that includes around 2 million biomedical-related full-text articles.
Following [7] and [5] the processing of huge data is not only possible, but also
very efficient and the microservice infrastructure is highly scalable.
3 Conclusion
Although several risks and problems have to be faced, we are sure that posi-
tive advantages of implementation of a microservice system do outweigh. For
both applications, SCAIView as well as BELIEF, several microservices are used
and shared for purpose of data retrieval, data persistence, and text mining.
The latter are classical microservices, whereas the retrieval and persistence ser-
vices are more general microservices. Additionally, the microservices in the data
layer can also be traditional webservices such as the terminology management
or authentication systems. We benefit from a highly scalable and fault-tolerant
environment for data processing. Furthermore, the system is flexible enough to
easily add or remove microservices from the processing pipeline. The continuous
4
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/
4 Dörpinghaus, Klein et al.
delivery process for externally-developed software like OLS or Keycloak is not
an issue anymore. An additional benefit is the safe and fast switching from one
technology to another: TeMOWl and OLS can be used at the same time for
multiple instances of SCAIView.
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