Skip Navigation


Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on July 9, 2004
Bioinformatics 2004 20(18):3326-3335; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/bth392
This Article
Right arrow FREE Full Text (Print PDF) Freely available
Right arrow FREE Full Text (Screen PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
20/18/3326    most recent
bth392v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Masseroli, M.
Right arrow Articles by Pinciroli, F.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Masseroli, M.
Right arrow Articles by Pinciroli, F.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

Bioinformatics vol. 20 issue 18 © Oxford University Press 2004; all rights reserved.

MyWEST: My Web Extraction Software Tool for effective mining of annotations from web-based databanks

Marco Masseroli 1,*, Andrea Stella 1, Natalia Meani 2,3, Myriam Alcalay 2,3 and Francesco Pinciroli 1

1 Bioengineering Department, Politecnico di Milano, I-20133 Milano, Italy, 2 IEO—European Institute of Oncology, I-20141 Milano, Italy and 3 IFOM—FIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology, I-20139 Milano, Italy

Received on February 20, 2004; revised on June 16, 2004; accepted on June 30, 2004
Advance Access Publication July 9, 2004

Motivation: High-throughput technologies create the necessity to mine large amounts of gene annotations from diverse databanks, and to integrate the resulting data. Most databanks can be interrogated only via Web, for a single gene at a time, and query results are generally available only in the HTML format. Although some databanks provide batch retrieval of data via FTP, this requires expertise and resources for locally reimplementing the databank.

Results: We developed MyWEST, a tool aimed at researchers without extensive informatics skills or resources, which exploits user-defined templates to easily mine selected annotations from different Web-interfaced databanks, and aggregates and structures results in an automatically updated database. Using microarray results from a model system of retinoic acid-induced differentiation, MyWEST effectively gathered relevant annotations from various biomolecular databanks, highlighted significant biological characteristics and supported a global approach to the understanding of complex cellular mechanisms.

Availability: MyWEST is freely available for non-profit use at http://www.medinfopoli.polimi.it/MyWEST/

Contact: masseroli{at}biomed.polimi.it

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer:
Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.