With the ongoing rapid increase in both volume and diversity of 'omic' data (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and others), the development and adoption of data standards is of paramount importance to realize the promise of systems biology. A recent trend in data standard development has been to use extensible markup language (XML) as the preferred mechanism to define data representations. But as illustrated here with a few examples from proteomics data, the syntactic and document-centric XML cannot achieve the level of interoperability required by the highly dynamic and integrated bioinformatics applications. In the present article, we discuss why semantic web technologies, as recommended by the World Wide Web consortium (W3C), expand current data standard technology for biological data representation and management.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.