This article is part of the supplement: Selected proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Data Integration in the Life Sciences 2008 .

Proceedings

Integrating biological data – the Distributed Annotation System

Andrew M Jenkinson¹ , Mario Albrecht³ , Ewan Birney¹ , Hagen Blankenburg³ , Thomas Down⁶ , Robert D Finn² , Henning Hermjakob¹ , Tim JP Hubbard² , Rafael C Jimenez^1,5 , Philip Jones¹ , Andreas Kähäri¹ , Eugene Kulesha¹ , José R Macías⁴ , Gabrielle A Reeves¹ and Andreas Prlić²

¹European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SD, UK

²Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA, UK

³Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, 66123, Germany

⁴National Centre for Biotechnology, Madrid, 28049, Spain

⁵National Bioinformatics Network, Cape Town, 7405, South Africa

⁶Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1QN, UK

author email corresponding author email

BMC Bioinformatics 2008, 9(Suppl 8):S3doi:10.1186/1471-2105-9-S8-S3

Published:	22 July 2008

Abstract

Background

The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) is a widely adopted protocol for dynamically integrating a wide range of biological data from geographically diverse sources. DAS continues to expand its applicability and evolve in response to new challenges facing integrative bioinformatics.

Results

Here we describe the various infrastructure components of DAS and present a new extended version of the DAS specification. Version 1.53E incorporates several recent developments, including its extension to serve new data types and an ontology for protein features.

Conclusion

Our extensions to the DAS protocol have facilitated the integration of new data types, and our improvements to the existing DAS infrastructure have addressed recent challenges. The steadily increasing numbers of available data sources demonstrates further adoption of the DAS protocol.