Report on the TREC 2004 genomics track

The goal of the TREC Genomics Track is to create test collections for evaluation of information retrieval (IR) and related tasks in the genomics domain. The Genomics Track differs from the other TREC tracks in that it is focused on retrieval in a specific domain. Initially the track has focused on modeling advanced users accessing the scientific literature. The advanced users include biomedical scientists and database curators or annotators. New advances in biotechnologies have changed the face of biological research, particularly "high-throughput" techniques such as gene microarrays (Mobasheri, Airley et al., 2004). These not only generate massive amounts of data but also have led to an explosion of new scientific knowledge. As a result, this domain is ripe for improved information access and management.