ArrayWiki: liberating microarray data from non-collaborative public repositories

A survey of microarray repositories reveals that their contents and data models are heterogeneous, and that repositories developed for different communities have become "silo-ed" over time. A community maintained resource, ArrayWiki, resolves these problems by uniting disparate meta-data that are difficult for users to find. This resource provides users with simple text-based searches across all experiment metadata, and exposes data to search engine crawlers (Semantic Agents) such as Google to further enhance data discovery. In addition, automated quality control processes provide extra information about data quality not available in other microarray resources. The data in this resource are open to community contribution, comment, and modification and are distributed and visualized using a novel, compact data storage format, BioPNG. ArrayWiki is available at http://www.bio-miblab.org/arraywiki.