HAMAP rules as SPARQL A portable annotation pipeline for genomes and proteomes

Abstract

Motivation: Genome and proteome annotation pipelines are generally custom built and therefore not easily reusable by other groups, which leads to duplication of effort, increased costs, and suboptimal results. One cost-effective way to increase the data quality in public databases is to encourage the adoption of annotation standards and technological solutions that enable the sharing of biological knowledge and tools for genome and proteome annotation.Results: We have translated the rules of our HAMAP proteome annotation pipeline to queries in the W3C standard SPARQL 1.1 syntax and applied them with two off-the-shelf SPARQL engines to UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot protein sequences described in RDF format. This approach is applicable to any genome or proteome annotation pipeline and greatly simplifies their reuse.Availability: HAMAP SPARQL rules and documentation are freely available for download from the HAMAP FTP site ftp://ftp.expasy.org/databases/hamap/hamap sparql.tar.gz under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 license. The annotations generated by the rules are under the CC-BY 4.0 license.Contact: hamap@sib.swiss Supplementary information: Supplementary data are included at the end of this document.