GEOMetaCuration: A web-based application for accurate manual curation of Gene Expression Omnibus metadata

Abstract

Metadata curation has become increasingly important for biological discovery and biomedical research because a large amount of heterogeneous biological data is currently freely available. To facilitate efficient metadata curation, we developed an easy-to-use web-based curation application, GEOMetaCuration, for curating the metadata of Gene Expression Omnibus datasets. It can eliminate mechanical operations that consume precious curation time and can help coordinate curation efforts among multiple curators. It improves the curation process by introducing various features that are critical to metadata curation, such as a back-end curation management system and a curator-friendly front-end. The application is based on a commonly used web development framework of Python/Django and is open-sourced under the GNU General Public License V3. GEOMetaCuration is expected to benefit the biocuration community and to contribute to computational generation of biological insights using large-scale biological data. An example use case can be found at the demo website: http://geometacuration.yubiolab.org. Source code URL: https://bitbucket.com/yubiolab/GEOMetaCuration