The European Bioinformatics Institute exists to deliver freely available data and to provide bioinformatics services to all facets of the scientific community in ways that promote scientific progress and to offer advanced bioinformatics training to scientists at all levels, from PhD students to independent investigators. The EBI provides a pipeline of tools and services to support the assembly and annotation of new genomes, in addition to facilitating the deposition of new knowledge into the public domain at the time of publication. The Ensembl project (http://www.ensembl.org) seeks to enable genomic science by providing high quality, integrated annotation on chordate and selected eukaryotic genomes. All supported species include comprehensive, evidence-based gene annotations and a selected set of genomes includes additional data focused on variation, comparative, evolutionary, functional and regulatory annotation. Ensembl Genomes (http://www.ensemblgenomes.org) extend genomic resources across the taxonomic space and consists of five sub-portals (for bacteria, protists, fungi, plants and invertebrate metazoa) designed to complement the genomes available in Ensembl. Once the initial sequencing, assembly and gene prediction work has been completed, it is then necessary to move on to the next phase of genome annotation. Through talks and demonstrations, this workshop will introduce the users to the resources available at the EBI to enable genome annotation. Finally, we will describe Train Online (www.ebi.ac.uk/training/online/), a free, web-based learning resource for life scientists.