BACKGROUND: Journal articles and databases are two major modes of communication in the biological sciences, and thus integrating these critical resources is of urgent importance to increase the pace of discovery. Projects focused on bridging the gap between journals and databases have been on the rise over the last five years and have resulted in the development of automated tools that can recognize entities within a document and link those entities to a relevant database. Unfortunately, automated tools cannot resolve ambiguities that arise from one term being used to signify entities that are quite distinct from one another. Instead, resolving these ambiguities requires some manual oversight. Finding the right balance between the speed and portability of automation and the accuracy and flexibility of manual effort is a crucial goal to making text markup a successful venture. RESULTS: We have established a journal article mark-up pipeline that links GENETICS journal articles and the model organism database (MOD) WormBase. This pipeline uses a lexicon built with entities from the database as a first step. The entity markup pipeline results in links from over nine classes of objects including genes, proteins, alleles, phenotypes and anatomical terms. New entities and ambiguities are discovered and resolved by a database curator through a manual quality control (QC) step, along with help from authors via a web form that is provided to them by the journal. New entities discovered through this pipeline are immediately sent to an appropriate curator at the database. Ambiguous entities that do not automatically resolve to one link are resolved by hand ensuring an accurate link. This pipeline has been extended to other databases, namely Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD) and FlyBase, and has been implemented in marking up a paper with links to multiple databases. CONCLUSIONS: Our semi-automated pipeline hyperlinks articles published in GENETICS to model organism databases such as WormBase. Our pipeline results in interactive articles that are data rich with high accuracy. The use of a manual quality control step sets this pipeline apart from other hyperlinking tools and results in benefits to authors, journals, readers and databases.
BACKGROUND: Journal articles and databases are two major modes of communication in the biological sciences, and thus integrating these critical resources is of urgent importance to increase the pace of discovery. Projects focused on bridging the gap between journals and databases have been on the rise over the last five years and have resulted in the development of automated tools that can recognize entities within a document and link those entities to a relevant database. Unfortunately, automated tools cannot resolve ambiguities that arise from one term being used to signify entities that are quite distinct from one another. Instead, resolving these ambiguities requires some manual oversight. Finding the right balance between the speed and portability of automation and the accuracy and flexibility of manual effort is a crucial goal to making text markup a successful venture. RESULTS: We have established a journal article mark-up pipeline that links GENETICS journal articles and the model organism database (MOD) WormBase. This pipeline uses a lexicon built with entities from the database as a first step. The entity markup pipeline results in links from over nine classes of objects including genes, proteins, alleles, phenotypes and anatomical terms. New entities and ambiguities are discovered and resolved by a database curator through a manual quality control (QC) step, along with help from authors via a web form that is provided to them by the journal. New entities discovered through this pipeline are immediately sent to an appropriate curator at the database. Ambiguous entities that do not automatically resolve to one link are resolved by hand ensuring an accurate link. This pipeline has been extended to other databases, namely Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD) and FlyBase, and has been implemented in marking up a paper with links to multiple databases. CONCLUSIONS: Our semi-automated pipeline hyperlinks articles published in GENETICS to model organism databases such as WormBase. Our pipeline results in interactive articles that are data rich with high accuracy. The use of a manual quality control step sets this pipeline apart from other hyperlinking tools and results in benefits to authors, journals, readers and databases.
Authors: Teresa K Attwood; Douglas B Kell; Philip McDermott; James Marsh; Steve R Pettifer; David Thorne Journal: Biochem J Date: 2009-12-10 Impact factor: 3.857
Authors: Kimberly Van Auken; Petra Fey; Tanya Z Berardini; Robert Dodson; Laurel Cooper; Donghui Li; Juancarlos Chan; Yuling Li; Siddhartha Basu; Hans-Michael Muller; Rex Chisholm; Eva Huala; Paul W Sternberg Journal: Database (Oxford) Date: 2012-11-17 Impact factor: 3.451
Authors: Karen Yook; Todd W Harris; Tamberlyn Bieri; Abigail Cabunoc; Juancarlos Chan; Wen J Chen; Paul Davis; Norie de la Cruz; Adrian Duong; Ruihua Fang; Uma Ganesan; Christian Grove; Kevin Howe; Snehalata Kadam; Ranjana Kishore; Raymond Lee; Yuling Li; Hans-Michael Muller; Cecilia Nakamura; Bill Nash; Philip Ozersky; Michael Paulini; Daniela Raciti; Arun Rangarajan; Gary Schindelman; Xiaoqi Shi; Erich M Schwarz; Mary Ann Tuli; Kimberly Van Auken; Daniel Wang; Xiaodong Wang; Gary Williams; Jonathan Hodgkin; Matthew Berriman; Richard Durbin; Paul Kersey; John Spieth; Lincoln Stein; Paul W Sternberg Journal: Nucleic Acids Res Date: 2011-11-08 Impact factor: 16.971
Authors: Daniel J Klionsky; Elspeth A Bruford; J Michael Cherry; Jonathan Hodgkin; Stanley J F Laulederkind; Amy G Singer Journal: Autophagy Date: 2012-07-27 Impact factor: 16.016