DATA MANAGEMENT AND CURATION AT TAIR

Carnegie Institution of Washington, 260 Panama St, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

TAIR is a web-based community resource that serves as a centralized location for Arabidopsis information (http://arabidopsis.org ). TAIR strives to provide a expertly curated, highly integrated information, supporting assertions with experimental data and providing attributions to data providers, analysis methods, and citations. Ultimately, the goal is to provide reference information for cross-species analyses and other inferences. Main sources of data include the literature, public databases, genomic projects, and submissions from individual researchers. Acquired data are annotated both computationally and manually, facilitated by software tools developed either in-house or from other groups. Curation involves assessment of data quality, validation of data, and association of data to each other, including assignment of sequences to genomic location and annotation of gene products to biochemcal functions. A major effort carried out at TAIR is the annotation of data objects (e.g., genes, microarray experiments, germplasm) using bio-ontologies, which are structured, controlled vocabularies describing biological knowledge. The use of bio-ontologies ensures consistency of data curation, supports extensive data integration, and enables robust exchange of information among heterogeneous informatics systems. During the presentation I will discuss how information is obtained, processed and annotated at TAIR, including standard operation procedures and different methods and software used for major data types curated at TAIR.