Integrating biological data through the genome

Owing to the ongoing success of the genome sequencing and structural genomics projects, the increase in both sequence and structural data is rapid. The development of tools for the annotation of sequence and structural data has become more important in the hope of keeping up with this data explosion. Scientists in this field have addressed these issues over the last 10 years and there now exists a wealth of methods and approaches to help interpret these data. However, there is no current way in which these methods can be incorporated easily so that the resulting annotations can be viewed together. This review discusses the development of these annotation methods and introduces the BioSapiens Network of Excellence, which has been formed in order to integrate the methods which have been developed in Europe.