Hi Deepak, nice post, when it comes to a more distributed and less centralised annotations of genomic databases, you have to mention DAS / BioDAS http://www.biomedcentral.com/1... - Duncan Hull
Duncan, good point. At some point, I need to compile all the resources and figure out which ones are actually any use. Any other recommendations? - Deepak
Don't forget that NCBI has quite a reasonable API: eutils (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/en...). It gets a lot of use in programming libraries (e.g. Bioperl) but for some reason, doesn't get much publicity or usage in web applications, mashups etc. - Neil Saunders
@Duncan I wondered if there is a recent paper using Biodas ? On my side, I've been trying to use the one from UCSC/Genome-Browser but the results where unuseable (not enough verbose, information missing, etc...) and I then went back to their anonymous mysql server. - Pierre
I like your comparison with Wikipedia. I guess Wikipedia works because it scales well by distributing curation of information across many users. Would be nice if NCBI/EBI could do this. My impression though is that many scientists would initially look down their nose at this, and would need a good use case to demonstrate the potential. - Michael Barton
