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7 Conclusions

The seminar brought together researchers from different research fields that are

linked to Text Mining and ontologies in the life sciences and gave them a plenum to

discuss their shared and disparate views. It became clear that there could be better

collaborative research and that truly interdisciplinary approaches should give better

results over research restricted to only one domain, but such collaborative research

first of all increases the overhead and are probably not easy to sustain. It also became

clear, that there are difficulties attached to collaborative work which are linked

to cultural or social differences in the research work, like the question of where and

what to publish to sustain individual careers. Furthermore, finding research funding

for developing mature systems, ready to be used by biologists, instead of research

prototypes supporting “only” a publication is difficult. This situation results in many

interesting approaches that are never made available for real life applications. However,

the participants clearly acknowledged that seminars such as this one are exactly

the right way to overcome those problems.