Curation of complex, context-dependent immunological data.

Background: The Immune Epitope Database and Analysis Resource (IEDB) is dedicated to capturing, housing and analyzing complex immune epitope related data http://www.immuneepitope.org.

Description: To identify and extract relevant data from the scientific literature in an efficient and accurate manner, novel processes were developed for manual and semi-automated annotation.

Conclusion: Formalized curation strategies enable the processing of a large volume of context-dependent data, which are now available to the scientific community in an accessible and transparent format. The experiences described herein are applicable to other databases housing complex biological data and requiring a high level of curation expertise.