Matthew Cockerill, Technical Director at BioMed Central, has written a great article on data mining open access research literature, including lots of fine quotes from Ian Donaldson, of the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute in Toronto:

"Biomolecular knowledge is really contained in the collective mind of the research community. The biomedical literature is an imperfect reflection of this knowledge that is obfuscated by natural language and its use in describing models of consensus that are constantly changing. Data mining techniques facilitate one step in creating reliable models that can be computationally accessed"
"The human mind has an attention horizon. While you're able to go anywhere in the world, you're unlikely to visit that place without knowing of its existence and how it relates to something near you. Data mining expands the circumference of that horizon."

"Much of the original World Wide Web grew from an open-source, open-content model, so too must the Semantic Web. Research scientists must team with their computer science brethren and fight against the intellectual property policies and runaway patent madness that make free dissemination of our products impossible."

You have to read the BioMed Central article. It opens with this great quote from Sydney Brenner, one of the great minds in biology:

The definition of data mining: what's my data is mine and what's yours is also mine.

9:10:22 AM