UniProt Knowledgebase: a hub of integrated data

AbstractData integration plays an increasingly important role in bringing together the large amounts of diverse information spread across disparate resources and presenting a comprehensive overview of these data to the scientific community. The UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB) acts as a central hub of protein knowledge by providing a unified view of protein sequence and functional information. Manual and automatic annotation procedures are used to add data directly to the database while extensive cross-referencing to more than 120 external databases provides access to additional relevant information in more specialised data collections. UniProtKB also integrates data such as protein sequences, protein-protein interactions, Gene Ontology terms and official gene nomenclature from a range of resources. All information in UniProtKB is attributed to its original source, allowing users to trace the provenance of all data. In addition, UniProtKB data is made freely available in a range of formats to facilitate integration with other databases and the UniProt Consortium is committed to using and promoting common data exchange formats and technologies. This approach ensures that information is captured in the most appropriate resource for subsequent integration with other databases and also ensures maximum curation efficiency by preventing duplication of efforts across multiple resources. How UniProt achieves this data capture and integration will be presented. The UniProt resource is available at "www.uniprot.org":http://www.uniprot.org.