Submitted:
23 July 2020
Posted:
24 July 2020
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Abstract
We present a set of software packages that provide uniform access to diverse biological vocabulary resources that are instrumental for current biocuration efforts and tools. The Unified Biological Dictionaries (UniBioDicts or UBDs) provide a single query-interface for accessing the online API services of leading biological data providers. Given a search string, UBDs return a list of matching term, identifier and metadata units from databases (e.g. UniProt), controlled vocabularies (e.g. PSI-MI), and ontologies (e.g. GO, via BioPortal). This can be coupled to for instance the ‘vsm-autocomplete’ module: an input field (user-interface component) that offers autocomplete lookup for these dictionaries. UBDs create a unified gateway for accessing life science concepts, helping curators find annotation terms across resources (based on descriptive metadata and unambiguous identifiers), and data users search and retrieve the right query terms.
Keywords:
biocuration
; dictionaries
; ontologies
; vocabularies
; VSM
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