Fraunhofer SCAI is opening a new knowledge space with information and analysis tools on COVID-19

Reviewed by James Ives, M.Psych. (Editor)Apr 24 2020

With the new website "covid19-knowledgespace.de", Fraunhofer SCAI - together with Fraunhofer IME, Fraunhofer IAIS, the Information Center for Life Sciences ZBMED and other research partners - is opening a new kind of knowledge space with analysis tools and information on COVID-19.

Central services in the COVID-19 Knowledge Space are the Biomedical Knowledge Miner "BiK>Mi" containing a highly curated cause-and-effect model for SARS-CoV-2, the literature mining environment "SCAIView", which has been optimized for COVID-19 text mining, and a special terminology representing major entities and concepts of COVID-19.

The scientific community worldwide has taken up the fight against SARS-CoV-2, which is also reflected by the sharp increase in the number of scientific publications on this subject.

More than 2000 new publications per week appeared in connection with COVID-19 at the end of April 2020.

The information contained in these publications can provide decisive pointers to new active ingredients for drugs and cause-effect-relationships -- if it is possible to maintain an overview. To this end, Fraunhofer SCAI has set up the new website "covid19-knowledgespace.de".

In a joint effort, the Fraunhofer institutes SCAI, IME, and IAIS, the Information Centre for Life Sciences (ZB MED), and other research partners have succeeded in providing the research community with a unique collection of analysis tools and data sources.

Central offers are the Biomedical Knowledge Miner BiK>Mi, which gives access to a highly curated, knowledge based cause-and-effect model of COVID-19 and a search with the knowledge discovery service SCAIView in the research literature on COVID-19.

We can refer to many years of experience in structuring and curating scientific data and knowledge in an indication area, however, with a focus on the field of neuroscience."

Dr. Martin Hofmann-Apitius, professor and Head of the Bioinformatics Department, Fraunhofer SCAI.

Since the corona pandemic has kept the world busy, Hofmann-Apitius and his team have applied the tools and methods developed in numerous funded projects to publications on COVID-19. The result is the new website, which shows the new possibilities opened up by translational, computational biomedicine.

The work on the COVID-19 Knowledge Space was also supported by the Institute's spin-off company, "Causality BioModels" in Cochin, India.

The company, which was founded last year, created a comprehensive cause-and-effect network based on scientific literature on the new coronavirus, providing a comprehensive overview - the COVID-19 knowledge graph - on the mechanisms underlying the pathophysiology of the virus.