Go3R - intelligent internet searches for alternatives to animal testing

EU Directive 86/609/EEC for the protection of laboratory animals obliges scientists to consider whether a planned animal experiment can be replaced, reduced or refined. To meet this regulatory obligation, scientists must consult the relevant scientificliterature prior to any experimental study using laboratory animals. Several million potentially 3Rs relevant documents are spread over the World Wide Web, biomedical literature and patent databases. Accessing this information simultaneously in afast and exhaustive manner is still impossible with traditional search technologies. This is where semantic web technologies may offer solutions.Go3R, the first knowledge-based search engine for alternative methods to animal experiments, was developed to enable scientists and regulatory authorities involved in the planning, authorisation and performance of animal experiments to determinethe availability of 3Rs relevant information from PubMed in a fast and comprehensive manner. Knowledge-based search engines integrate human expert domain knowledge into retrieval procedures. The technical basis of Go3R is specific 3Rs expert knowledge captured within a 3Rs specific ontology. This ontology is a hierarchically structured network of terms, such as toxicological endpoints, 3Rs methods and cell lines.When a user performs a search query with Go3R, the search engine expands this request using the ontology's structure and terminology, which has been previously used to index the documents. It highlights relevant terms or their synonyms that occur in both and uses them to arrange the documents within an "intelligent" directory of contents. The directory is presented alongside the search results and serves as a convenient means of navigation.The Go3R beta-version is available online free of charge (www.Go3R.org). This beta-version right now contains no less than 17,000 3R-relevant terms structured in 26 branches with biomedical headings, e.g. Cell Culture Technology, 3RsMethods in the Life Sciences and others. Scientific documents that mention one of these terms or a synonym are automatically assigned to the respective branch.Go3R was developed to allow retrieval of 3Rs relevant documents, even if they do not explicitly mention a 3Rs-relevant term. This will be achieved by a technique called "indirect mapping".Here, related terms pointing to a certain topic without mentioning it are exploited for the assignment, e.g. the combination of 3T3-cells, neutral red, irradiation, for assignment to the term 3Rs in phototoxicity testing.Thanks to funding by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the search engine will be re-engineered and extended to meet the requirements of scientists and competent authorities even better. An essential extension will bethe additional inclusion of scientific resources other than PubMed in the near future. The ultimate aim, however, is to open up resources that right now are non-accessible to an indispensability search due to their non-indexed and/or unstructured nature.The authors gratefully acknowledge the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), Berlin, Transinsight GmbH, Dresden, and BASF SE for providing the financial, technical andscientific support necessary for developing and maintaining the search engine and for warranting its Internet presence.Reference: Sauer, U.G., Wachter, T., Grune, B. et al. (2009). Go3R Semantic internet search engine for alternative methods to animal testing. ALTEX 26 (1), 17-31.Keywords: 3Rs principle, replacement, reduction, refinement, information retrieval, literature search, animal testing alternatives, semantic search technology, ontology