WikiProteins, formally launched this week, is using the social network approach to bring together and annotate structural and other information in a single front end.
Dutch researcher Barend Mons: getting researchers to maintain their collective resource
The project, headed by Barend Mons, a bioinformatician at the Erasmus Medical Centre and the Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, aims to improve the value of existing databases by getting researchers to maintain their collective resource and to add to its utility by annotating it with information such as protein function or the role of particular proteins in disease.
WikiProteins will initially link databases including Medline, UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, GeneOntology and IntAct.
The intention is that WikiProteins acts as an online workspace that will enable researchers to exchange and explore existing public knowledge.
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