title: MageComet--web application for harmonizing existing large-scale experiment descriptions.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Meta-analysis of large gene expression datasets obtained from public repositories requires consistently annotated data. Curation of such experiments, however, is an expert activity which involves repetitive manipulation of text. Existing tools for automated curation are few, which bottleneck the analysis pipeline.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We present MageComet, a web application for biologists and annotators that facilitates the re-annotation of gene expression experiments in MAGE-TAB format. It incorporates data mining, automatic annotation, use of ontologies and data validation to improve the consistency and quality of experimental meta-data from the ArrayExpress Repository.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Hunter College, City University of New York, NY 10065, USA. xue.vin@gmail.com
authors.forename: Vincent
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Xue
authors.forename: Tony
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Burdett
authors.forename: Margus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lukk
authors.forename: Julie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Taylor
authors.forename: Alvis
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Brazma
authors.forename: Helen
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Parkinson
mesh_terms: D057225:Data Mining; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D020407:Internet; D015201:Meta-Analysis as Topic; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D059467:Transcriptome