Latest developments in Semantic Web technologies applied to the glycosciences

The Integrated Life Science Database Project of Japan funded a group of glycoscientists to carry out a project to integrate glycoscience databases using Semantic Web technologies. As a continuation of the previous project period, the Japan Consortium for Glycobiology and Glycotechnology Database (JCGGDB) developed several glycoscience-related databases. The GlycoProtDB database is among those being integrated, providing an important resource to understand protein glycosylation. Another database being integrated is GlycoEpitope, a comprehensive database of carbohydrate epitopes and antibodies. In the current project period, we started the development of GlyTouCan, the international glycan structure repository providing unique accession numbers to all glycan structures. Although such databases are sufficiently important in and of themselves, their integration with other—omics data such as the protein information in UniProt will be crucial to bring glycosciences to the forefront of life sciences. However, to integrate such disparate sets of data among different fields in a way such that future maintenance costs are minimal, standardized ontologies and formats must be established. Our latest project has attempted to define the minimal standards that are necessary to enable this integration. The technical challenges to integrate all these databases and the technologies to overcome these challenges will be described.