The Functional Genomics Network in the evolution of biological text mining over the past decade.

Different programs of The European Science Foundation (ESF) have contributed significantly to connect researchers in Europe and beyond through several initiatives. This support was particularly relevant for the development of the areas related with extracting information from papers (text-mining) because it supported the field in its early phases long before it was recognized by the community. We review the historical development of text mining research and how it was introduced in bioinformatics. Specific applications in (functional) genomics are described like it's integration in genome annotation pipelines and the support to the analysis of high-throughput genomics experimental data, and we highlight the activities of evaluation of methods and benchmarking for which the ESF programme support was instrumental.