Channelpedia
Web based, freely accessible information management framework for comprehensive ion channel information
Web based, freely accessible information management framework for comprehensive ion channel information
Channelpedia uses a unique approach to manage scientific information by combining the functionality of unstructured wiki-like data with the advantage of a structured database. Currently it contains information for voltage gated ion channels, kinetic models and electrophysiology data from Kv channels.
It is a knowledge base system centered on genetically expressed ion channel models and it encourages researchers of the field to contribute, build and refine the information through an interactive wiki-like interface. It is web-based, freely accessible and currently contains 187 annotated ion channels with 50 Hodgkin-Huxley models.
Channelpedia provides an ideal platform to collectively build ion channel knowledge base by accommodating both structured and unstructured data. The current version of Channelpedia contains the following sections: Introduction, Genes, Ontologies, Interactions, Structure, Expression, Distribution, Function, Kinetics and Models.
Newly published literature related to ion channels is automatically queried every week from PubMed and added to respective categories. Currently, Channelpedia contains ~180,000 abstracts related to ion channels from Pubmed.
Contributors and existing online resources are the two main sources of data. The unstructured data is populated by contributors, who can freely edit formatted text and upload images without violating copyright agreements. Structured data contains data from existing online resources managed by administrator using automated scripts. Experimental data and analyzed data from literature is uploaded by contributors and stored as structured data.