"Discovery Informatics" is a broad term that is now seeing some use as a way of describing a series of issues that have been of ongoing interest to CNI: text mining for knowledge discovery; text markup, multimedia tagging, and metadata structures to facilitate text mining, linking and information retrieval , annotation frameworks, tools, and the implications of all of these developments for the scholarly publishing system in the broadest sense.

NSF sponsored a workshop on February 2-3, 2012 that, based on the report (I was not at the meeting) looked at many of these issues with particular emphasis  on the perspectives of research coming out of the Artificial Intelligence and machine learning communities. The report can be found at

http://www.isi.edu/~gil/diw2012/NSFDiscoveryInformatics2012-FinalReport.pdf

and considerable background on the workshop is at

http://www.discoveryinformaticsinitiative.org/diw2012

along with some information about a follow-on event scheduled for November 2012.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI