title: DAS writeback: a collaborative annotation system.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Centralised resources such as GenBank and UniProt are perfect examples of the major international efforts that have been made to integrate and share biological information. However, additional data that adds value to these resources needs a simple and rapid route to public access. The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) provides an adequate environment to integrate genomic and proteomic information from multiple sources, making this information accessible to the community. DAS offers a way to distribute and access information but it does not provide domain experts with the mechanisms to participate in the curation process of the available biological entities and their annotations.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We designed and developed a Collaborative Annotation System for proteins called DAS Writeback. DAS writeback is a protocol extension of DAS to provide the functionalities of adding, editing and deleting annotations. We implemented this new specification as extensions of both a DAS server and a DAS client. The architecture was designed with the involvement of the DAS community and it was improved after performing usability experiments emulating a real annotation task.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We demonstrate that DAS Writeback is effective, usable and will provide the appropriate environment for the creation and evolution of community protein annotation.
authors.affiliation: Computer Sciences Department, University of Cape Town, South Africa. gsalazar@cs.uct.ac.za
authors.forename: Gustavo A
authors.initials: GA
authors.lastname: Salazar
authors.forename: Rafael C
authors.initials: RC
authors.lastname: Jimenez
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Garcia
authors.forename: Henning
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Hermjakob
authors.forename: Nicola
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Mulder
authors.forename: Edwin
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Blake
mesh_terms: D003195:Computer Communication Networks; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D012984:Software