Seminar - Prof. Theresa Attwood

Today, there are hundreds of databases around the world housing nucleotide or protein sequences, protein family information, protein structural data, metabolic pathways, genetically inherited disease information, mutation data, and so on. Now commonplace tools in the lab., few researchers stop to consider how the data actually get there. In some cases, armies of curators work together to collate useful facts from disparate sources; in others, haunted individuals toil away in isolation, trawling countless online abstracts, desperate to glean nuggets of information from the bottomless pit of confusion that is the biomedical literature.

This talk outlines some of the issues, some of the nightmares, some of the fantasies, and the bald reality that confronts database annotators today, focusing on some of the progress that has been made in Manchester towards the creation of automatic annotation assistant tools.