This proposal will create tools to link repositories of biochemical pathway information via a graph like annotation system. We will use these tools to annotate KEGG, a popular repository of pathway information. Current biochemical information is fragmentary, and the new information provided by the National Human Genome Research Project has only recently become available. We can thus expect a great deal of change in that information in the near term. When this happens, information stored according to older patterns can be lost or can be very difficult to find. Using the MetaGraph tools, we will produce a representation that is more robust to these changes, and that will allow researchers to annotate partially understood or otherwise unlinked data. This will make it easier to spot connections and to make use of early fragmentary data. We will also provide the needed data import, display, and curation tools to make the project usable by a wider variety of researchers. We do not intend to reproduce data where it can be referred to "in-place", as that would duplicate the immense data curation effort undertaken by these organizations. Instead, what we provide is a way for a researcher to add their own knowledge about relationships and pathways to the preexisting data repositories.
Thesaurus Terms: bioinformatics, computational biology, computer graphics /printing, computer system design /evaluation, genome, molecular biology information system
