Building an efficient curation workflow for the Arabidopsis literature corpus

TAIR (The Arabidopsis Information Resource) is the model organism database (MOD) for Arabidopsis thaliana, a model plant with a literature corpus of about 39 000 articles in PubMed, with over 4300 new articles added in 2011. We have developed a literature curation workflow incorporating both automated and manual elements to cope with this flood of new research articles. The current workflow can be divided into two phases: article selection and curation. Structured controlled vocabularies, such as the Gene Ontology and Plant Ontology are used to capture free text information in the literature as succinct ontology-based annotations suitable for the application of computational analysis methods. We also describe our curation platform and the use of text mining tools in our workflow.