Developing Content for the Arabidopsis Information Portal

The Arabidopsis Information Portal (https://www.araport.org) is an open-access online community resource for Arabidopsis research. AIP enables biologists to navigate from the Arabidopsis thaliana Col-0 reference genome and its annotation to a broad and increasing range of attributes including gene expression, protein function and interaction networks, co-expression data and gene ontologies. AIP is designed to grow with the Arabidopsis community by providing an extensible framework for incorporation of new data sources and creation of user interfaces to consume them. AIP relies on a data warehouse (InterMine) to provide a searchable index of sequence-associated data. AIP relies on data federation to deliver in-depth information at run time. To facilitate data federation, AIP uses innovative middleware based on the iPlant Agave platform to support enrollment, discovery, and access to community-developed web services within a unified framework. AIP incorporates and integrates software from GMOD including InterMine, JBrowse, GBrowse, WebApollo, Tripal, and Chado, and other open-source technologies. The AIP project itself is fully open source, maintaining an active GitHub repository and virtual organization. AIP hosts tutorials, workshops, and hackathons to help the community enrich and exploit this resource.