Background: The UniProt consortium was formed in 2002 by groups from the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and the Protein Information Resource (PIR) at Georgetown University, and soon afterwards the website http://www.uniprot.org was set up as a central entry point to UniProt resources. Requests to this address were redirected to one of the three organisations' websites. While these sites shared a set of static pages with general information about UniProt, their pages for searching and viewing data were different. To provide users with a consistent view and to cut the cost of maintaining three separate sites, the consortium decided to develop a common website for UniProt. Following several years of intense development and a year of public beta testing, the http://www.uniprot.org domain was switched to the newly developed site described in this paper in July 2008.
The UniProt consortium is the main provider of protein sequence and annotation data for much of the life sciences community [The UniProt Consortium: The Universal Protein Resource (UniProt). Nucleic Acids Res 2008, 36:D190-D195.]. The www.uniprot.org website is the primary access point to this data and to documentation and basic tools for the data. This paper discusses the design and implementation of the new website, which was released in July 2008, and shows how it improves data access for users with different levels of experience, as well as to machines for automated access.
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