Maojo et al Examples of applications If we search for the term “nanoinformatics” in PubMed, only a few references are available at the time of writing – and most by the authors themselves. There are several reasons for such a result. First, the term “nanoinformatics” is quite new, and its use is slowly expanding. Second, many computer applications have been developed for nanotechnological and nanomedical applications, but they have not been listed or published under the umbrella of the term “nanoinformatics.” Finally, the concept of nanoinformatics as an interdisciplin- ary field, with research and results that can lead to advancing the scientific basis of nanomedicine and its developments, has not yet been widely adopted. That is, nanoinformatics has not yet been recognized as a field in which original and independent work can be carried out. Dovepress In this section, we give some examples that fully conform to “nanoinformatics” as characterized in this paper. They are related to information retrieval, text mining for locating nano- toxicity information in the literature, and visual ontologies. Information retrieval We have recently developed an automated text indexing and retrieval engine that links scientific articles to concepts from the NanoParticle Ontology88 and the Foundational Model of Anatomy.121 The indexing engine was built following a dictionary-based approach, similar to that adopted by Garten and Altman.122 With the search engine, users can search for papers reporting which nanoparticles are more suitable for delivering a certain drug to a given anatomical location, or for identifying which nanoparticles are toxic to a specific Figure 2 Screenshot of the Nanoparticles Toxicity Searcher, using “quantum dots” as an example. 3878 submit your manuscript | www.dovepress.com Dovepress International Journal of Nanomedicine 2012:7