WikiPathways: A Wikipedia for biological pathways

Since its inception in 2008, WikiPathways, a wiki for biological pathways, has grown to include over 2,800 individual pathways. It currently has over 700 active users and boasts more than 500 citations in scientific literature.

What is WikiPathways?

WikiPathways is a structured knowledge base for biological pathways that is collaboratively edited by the scientific community. Like Wikipedia, it allows anyone to create or edit encyclopedia records which are all moderated and curated by other WikiPathways users.

Each WikiPathways entry combines genes, proteins, metabolites, and interactions involved in a single pathway or process. All elements of the pathway have links to corresponding entries in reference databases such as UniProt and PubChem, making WikiPathways an important crystallisation point for integrating knowledge about biological pathways.

Applications of WikiPathways

A large biological pathway database, WikiPathways is used for a variety of applications including omics and gene expression analyses.

The dataset can also be used to perform other types of data analysis, visualise research data in the context of pathways, and build pathway models. Moreover, the WikiPathways website itself is a useful resource for learning about pathways.

Accessing WikiPathways data

The primary way to access WikiPathways is via wikipathways.org, the official website of the project. The data can also be accessed programmatically via the web service API.

WikiPathways entries are also referenced in Wikipedia, Wikidata, and other open datasets.

WikiPathways as linked data

Since 2016, the WikiPathways dataset has also been provided in the RDF (linked data) format. The data can be queried programmatically using the SPARQL endpoint which also provides a user-friendly SPARQL query editor.

The WikiPathways RDF dataset uses two core vocabularies and the standard set of identifiers for genes, proteins, and metabolites to support linking to other linked biological data sources. This enables users to utilise SPARQL federation to easily combine information from WikiPathways with other linked data sets.

The bottom line

The collaboratively edited WikiPathways encyclopedia was launched in 2008 as an "experiment", and today integrates the data for over 2,800 biological pathways and makes it easily accessible both via wikipathways.org and programmatically as linked data.

The Wikipedia-like style of WikiPathways makes it stand out from other omics datasets. It actively promotes the collaborative approach to research and sharing of biological knowledge.

See also

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• Awesome bioinformatics - A curated list of awesome resources on bioinformatics.
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• Bioinformatics pronunciation guide - A pronunciation guide for bioinformatics terms.