Saturday, September 15, 2007

Pathguide - Light in the pathway and interaction jungle?


I found today in my del.ico.us network a bookmark from Egon to Pathguide

Pathguide contains information about 231 biological pathway resources. Click on a link to go to the resource home page or 'Details' for a description page. Databases that are free and those supporting BioPAX, CellML, PSI-MI or SBML standards are respectively indicated.
This is a fantastic collection of interaction/metabolic/signaling pathways and networks!
Though, I was astonished and a little bit disappointed about the low number of databases, which support open standards.

14 PSI-MI (Proteomics Standards Initiative - Molecular Interactions)
13 BioPAX (Biological Pathways Exchange)
13 SBML (Systems Biology Markup Language)
3 CellML
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43 databases use open standards

That are only 18.6% of all databases! In other words, this confirms again the collaboration problem. Are people really thinking that it already helps to put things online or sharing it as open source? This is just not true as already summarized before and especially not if an oligarchy has to create those standards.

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