PLoS ONE (Jan 2012)

MyDas, an extensible Java DAS server.

  • Gustavo A Salazar,
  • Leyla J García,
  • Philip Jones,
  • Rafael C Jimenez,
  • Antony F Quinn,
  • Andrew M Jenkinson,
  • Nicola Mulder,
  • Maria Martin,
  • Sarah Hunter,
  • Henning Hermjakob

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0044180
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7, no. 9
p. e44180

Abstract

Read online

A large number of diverse, complex, and distributed data resources are currently available in the Bioinformatics domain. The pace of discovery and the diversity of information means that centralised reference databases like UniProt and Ensembl cannot integrate all potentially relevant information sources. From a user perspective however, centralised access to all relevant information concerning a specific query is essential. The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) defines a communication protocol to exchange annotations on genomic and protein sequences; this standardisation enables clients to retrieve data from a myriad of sources, thus offering centralised access to end-users.We introduce MyDas, a web server that facilitates the publishing of biological annotations according to the DAS specification. It deals with the common functionality requirements of making data available, while also providing an extension mechanism in order to implement the specifics of data store interaction. MyDas allows the user to define where the required information is located along with its structure, and is then responsible for the communication protocol details.