A SAVSNET first - veterinary text mining boot camp
This week SAVSNET hosted a get together of students working on veterinary data from Bristol, Nottingham, Edinburgh and Liverpool. Jenny Newman (PhD student with SAVSNET and HeRC), who is developing tools to extract information from the consultation text collated within the SAVSNET dataset, shared her experiences of text mining with the group. Over the course of the day everybody fathomed how to write and use regular expressions, a form of search phrase that can be used to identify patterns within text. The plan is for ongoing learning by teamwork and shared tasks over the coming months. Text mining has many applications within large datasets, from real-time surveillance to retrospective identification of cases where a specific diagnosis has been made or treatment given. By working collaboratively with colleagues around the country, the group hopes to maximise the power and diversity of text mining tools trained for the veterinary narrative.