Automatic rule generation for protein annotation with the C4.5 data mining algorithm applied on SWISS-PROT

The gap between the amount of newly submitted protein data and reliable functional annotation in public databases is growing. Traditional manual annotation by literature curation and sequence analysis tools without the use of automated annotation systems is not able to keep up with the ever increasing quantity of data that is submitted. Automated supplements to manually curated databases such as TrEMBL or GenPept cover raw data but provide only limited annotation. To improve this situation automatic tools are needed that support manual annotation, automatically increase the amount of reliable information and help to detect inconsistencies in manually generated annotations.