Abstract
BackgroundThe Distributed Annotation System (DAS) is a network protocol for exchanging biological data. It is frequently used to share annotations of genomes and protein sequence.ResultsHere we present several extensions to the current DAS 1.5 protocol. These provide new commands to share alignments, three dimensional molecular structure data, add the possibility for registration and discovery of DAS servers, and provide a convention how to provide different types of data plots. We present examples of web sites and applications that use the new extensions. We operate a public registry of DAS sources, which now includes entries for more than 250 distinct sources.ConclusionOur DAS extensions are essential for the management of the growing number of services and exchange of diverse biological data sets. In addition the extensions allow new types of applications to be developed and scientific questions to be addressed. The registry of DAS sources is available at
Highlights
The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) is a network protocol for exchanging biological data
DAS mediated data exchange and visualisation today is heavily used in the popular genome browsers like Ensembl ([4]), Wormbase [8], and GBrowse
With the extensions presented here DAS becomes applicable to new data types, which adds another level of complexity
Summary
The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) is a network protocol for exchanging biological data. A number of centralized database resources are available that aim to integrate this data, such as Entrez [1], Interpro [2], MSD [3], and Ensembl [4]. Databases that integrate huge datasets are faced with problems regarding scaleability of their storage facilities, how to manage frequent updates and how to exchange the data with the community. Rather than building bigger centralized repositories, an alternative strategy is to encourage individual data providers to offer their results in standard formats, provide users with tools which can find and communicate with these distributed repositories, and build integrated views on demand. The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) is a widely used system for biological sequence annotation that follows this latter approach [5].
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