Nanoinformatics: developing advanced informatics applications for nanomedicine

In this chapter we introduce a new informatics field called “Nanoinformatics” based on our own research and on consensus work carried out under the auspices of the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the European Commission (EC). Nanoinformatics can be defined as the “use of informatics techniques for analyzing and processing information about the structure and physicochemical characteristics of nanoparticles, their environments, and applications”. Its goal is to use information to accelerate research in nanomedicine. We summarize various areas of research and applications, such as ontologies and semantic search, text mining, imaging, standards, together with an example of the research our group has performed in this field on text mining for extracting information about nanotoxicity from the literature