Open Access Highly Accessed Software    Author Affiliations
For all author emails, please log on.    Received:30 May 2007
Accepted:18 October 2007 Published:18 October 2007  © 2007 Côté
et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.           Biological data is
being generated at an unparalleled rate and data analysis is
becoming a key challenge in bioinformatics and systems biology.
Two common tasks that are more difficult than they should be are
identifier unification, where datasets from various sources must
be merged together for analysis and identifier translation,
where identifiers from one source (e.g. NCBI gi number) need to
be converted to those from another source (e.g. Ensembl) so that
they can be used in database specific tools and queries. A major
hindrance to the effective implementation of those tasks is that
data comes from multiple sources, each using a proprietary
identifier scheme that is not always easily traceable to a
specific provider.  It is common to observe the same protein
sequence being ref