Biocuration in the Era of Big Data

CAS Key Laboratory of Genome Sciences and Information, Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China With the rapid advancements in high-throughput sequencing technologies, biology enters the era of big data. Many databases developed for managing biological data are traditionally based on expert curation, viz., conducted manually by dedicated experts. However, with the burgeoning volume of biological data and increasingly diverse densely informative published literatures, expert curation becomes more and more laborious and time consuming, increasingly lagging behind knowledge creation, or worse, not being done at all in fields where insufficient funds can be allocated to curation. Although traditionally expert-curated databases have proven important for biological studies, they are struggling with the flood of knowledge and accordingly requiring a large number of people getting involved in curation, viz., community curation-exploiting the whole power of the scientific community for knowledge integration. A case in point that harnesses community intelligence in knowledge integration is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, allows anyone to create/edit any content and features collaborative knowledge curation, up-to-date content, huge coverage, and low cost for maintenance. Despite fears that the openness of editorial capacity could lead to incorporation of significant flawed content, it is reported that Wikipedia rivals the traditional encyclopedia in accuracy. Due to the extraordinary success of Wikipedia, it has been advocated that biological databases go wiki. As a consequence, more than a dozen biological wikis (bio-wiki) have been constructed to call on community intelligence in knowledge curation. To date, however, there is no community-curated resource for rice, as rice is the most important staple food feeding a large part of the world population and building expert-curated rice reference genomes with comprehensive and accurate annotations remains a formidable ...