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Briefings in Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on December 6, 2008
Briefings in Bioinformatics 2008 9(6):506-517; doi:10.1093/bib/bbn034
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

This article appears in the following Briefings in Bioinformatics issue: Special Issue:Database Integration in Life Sciences [View the issue table of contents]

Data curation + process curation=data integration + science

Carole Goble, Robert Stevens, Duncan Hull, Katy Wolstencroft and Rodrigo Lopez

Corresponding author. Carole Goble, School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK. Tel: +44 161 275 6195; Fax: +44 161 275 6236; E-mail: robert.stevens{at}manchester.ac.uk

In bioinformatics, we are familiar with the idea of curated data as a prerequisite for data integration. We neglect, often to our cost, the curation and cataloguing of the processes that we use to integrate and analyse our data. Programmatic access to services, for data and processes, means that compositions of services can be made that represent the in silico experiments or processes that bioinformaticians perform. Data integration through workflows depends on being able to know what services exist and where to find those services. The large number of services and the operations they perform, their arbitrary naming and lack of documentation, however, mean that they can be difficult to use. The workflows themselves are composite processes that could be pooled and reused but only if they too can be found and understood. Thus appropriate curation, including semantic mark-up, would enable processes to be found, maintained and consequently used more easily. This broader view on semantic annotation is vital for full data integration that is necessary for the modern scientific analyses in biology. This article will brief the community on the current state of the art and the current challenges for process curation, both within and without the Life Sciences.

Keywords: curation, semantic annotation, processes, services, workflow, ontology, metadata

Submitted: May 16, 2008. Received (in revised form): July 25, 2008.


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