Converting neXtProt into Linked Data and nanopublications

Abstract

The development of Linked Data provides the opportunity for databases to supply extensive volumes of biological data, information, and knowledge in a machine interpretable format to make previously isolated data silos interoperable. To increase ease of use, often databases incorporate annotations from several different resources. Linked Data can overcome many formatting and identifier issues that prevent data interoperability, but the extensive cross incorporation of annotations between databases makes the tracking of provenance in open, decentralized systems especially important. With the diversity of published data, provenance information becomes critical to providing reliable and trustworthy services to scientists. The nanopublication system addresses many of these challenges. We have developed the neXtProt Linked Data by serializing in RDF/XML annotations specific to neXtProt and started employing the nanopublication model to give appropriate attribution to all data. Specifically, a use case demonstrates the handling of post-translational modification (PTM) data modeled as nanopublications to illustrate the how the different levels of provenance and data quality thresholds can be captured in this model.