Text-mining for Medicinal Plants

Posted by timothy on Monday April 25, 2005 @06:07AM from the clever-convergence dept.

Damien1972 writes "Researchers are exploring ancient texts for medicinal plant information using text-mining. From Shamans and Robots: Bridging the Past and Future of Ethnobotany and Bioprospecting: "A new procedure that is being explored by researchers to track and classify useful medicinal plant species may negate some of the issues surrounding the acquisition of knowledge ... This method involves a practice called "text-mining," in which old botanical works are scoured for references to medicinal plants.""

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Wikipedia by BrookHarty · 2005-04-25 06:11 · Score: 4, Insightful

This would be a good use for Wikipedia, each plant's information should be put into into this opensource encyclopedia.

I see this as part of the problem, getting the information out, reporting plants drug use out of books into a format more people can use. Perfect use for Wikipedia.