Article
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UniBioDicts: Unified access to Biological Dictionaries
Version 1
: Received: 23 July 2020 / Approved: 24 July 2020 / Online: 24 July 2020 (13:48:50 CEST)
How to cite: Zobolas, J.; Touré, V.; Kuiper, M.; Vercruysse, S. UniBioDicts: Unified access to Biological Dictionaries. Preprints 2020, 2020070586 (doi: 10.20944/preprints202007.0586.v1). Zobolas, J.; Touré, V.; Kuiper, M.; Vercruysse, S. UniBioDicts: Unified access to Biological Dictionaries. Preprints 2020, 2020070586 (doi: 10.20944/preprints202007.0586.v1).
Abstract
We present a set of software packages that provide uniform access to diverse biological vocabulary resources that are instrumental for current biocuration efforts and tools. The Unified Biological Dictionaries (UniBioDicts or UBDs) provide a single query-interface for accessing the online API services of leading biological data providers. Given a search string, UBDs return a list of matching term, identifier and metadata units from databases (e.g. UniProt), controlled vocabularies (e.g. PSI-MI), and ontologies (e.g. GO, via BioPortal). This can be coupled to for instance the ‘vsm-autocomplete’ module: an input field (user-interface component) that offers autocomplete lookup for these dictionaries. UBDs create a unified gateway for accessing life science concepts, helping curators find annotation terms across resources (based on descriptive metadata and unambiguous identifiers), and data users search and retrieve the right query terms.
Supplementary and Associated Material
https://github.com/UniBioDicts: UniBioDicts GitHub-organization
https://vsmjs.github.io: Vsmjs project page
Subject Areas
biocuration; dictionaries; ontologies; vocabularies; VSM
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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