ProFAL: PROtein Functional Annotation through Literature

We introduce ProFAL (PROtein Functional Annotation through Literature), a new information system for automatic annotation of biological databases using Bioinformatics methods. The annotations are (gene-product, functional property) pairs, associating the attributes of a gene-product, stored in the database, to functional properties. The system retrieves documents related to each geneproduct from online databases and extracts functional properties from their text. To validate these annotations, ProFAL implements heuristics based on a measure of correlation between annotations that we have introduced. To verify the validated annotations, ProFAL also provides a specific interface for manual curation. We evaluate the implementation and performance of ProFAL in a case-study.