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Journals and conference proceedings represent the dominant mechanisms for reporting new biomedical results. The unstructured nature of such publications makes it difficult to utilize data mining or automated knowledge discovery techniques. Annotation (or markup) of these unstructured documents represents the first step in making these documents machine-analyzable. Often, however, the use of similar (or the same) labels for different entities and the use of different labels for the same entity makes entity extraction difficult in biomedical literature. In this paper we present a system called BioAnnotator for identifying and classifying biological terms in documents. BioAnnotator uses domain-based dictionary lookup for recognizing known terms and a rule engine for discovering new terms. We explain how the system uses a biomedical dictionary to learn extraction patterns for the rule engine and how it disambiguates biological terms that belong to multiple semantic classes.

Vulnerability to climate change is a multi-layered and multi-faceted phenomena, determined by both biophysical and socio-economic factors, leading to differential vulnerabilities for women and men from different categories, groups and locations. Thus, there are varying gendered differences in vulnerabilities in any context, and not all women or all men are equally vulnerable, nor are they vulnerable in a similar way – vulnerabilities vary in nature and type. Vulnerabilities to climate change are often studied in isolation and compartmentalization of the various interlinked contextual conditions (e.g. social and gender, political, economic and geographical/location) and other socio-economic drivers of change, such as globalisation, urbanization, technological and infrastructure development. However, climate change vulnerabilities are manifestations of interlinkages and an intersecting of the contextual conditions and socioeconomic drivers of change against the backdrop of climate change. This thematic issue brings together studies on these aspects of intersectionality of the contextual conditions and drivers of change, which leads to various manifestations of gendered vulnerabilities, adding to the current knowledge on gender and climate change vulnerabilities especially from the HKH region perspective.

Vulnerability is a set of conditions of people that is derived from the historical and prevailing socio-economic, cultural, environmental and political contexts along with understanding future scenarios, especially for climate change. This study aimed at better understanding the nature and types of socio-economic drivers and social vulnerabilities in the context of increasing climatic stresses in four river basins in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region. A multidimensional, contextual and integrated approach has been applied using participatory qualitative tools and techniques to identify major socio-economic drivers and conditions along with climatic factors in upstream, midstream and downstream of the river basins. In upstream and midstream region, people’s livelihood is dependent on subsistent agriculture, horticulture, pastoralism and tourism while in downstream, agriculture and fisheries are the major livelihood options. Climate sensitive natural resources based livelihoods are severely affected across the river basins. Poor and marginal population are not able take adequate adaptation measures due to lack of capacities, poor access to resources, services, information, which push them into greater vulnerability. The vulnerable groups in all four river basins are marginalized sections who are conditioned by economic classes, gender and social norms and living in geographically underdeveloped areas. For instance, poor, women, religious/ ethnic minorities, subordinate caste groups, char dwellers. Poor governance and the lack of access to resources and services have made the situation worse. All these factors are enhancing social vulnerability across the basins and study sites. Social protection measures, enhancement of human capitals and livelihood diversification with pro-poor and gender responsive adaptation and socially inclusive policy are needed to address growing social vulnerability.