The BioPAX Validator

Bioinformatics. 2013 Oct 15;29(20):2659-60. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btt452. Epub 2013 Aug 5.

Abstract

Summary: BioPAX is a community-developed standard language for biological pathway data. A key functionality required for efficient BioPAX data exchange is validation-detecting errors and inconsistencies in BioPAX documents. The BioPAX Validator is a command-line tool, Java library and online web service for BioPAX that performs >100 classes of consistency checks.

Availability and implementation: The validator recognizes common syntactic errors and semantic inconsistencies and reports them in a customizable human readable format. It can also automatically fix some errors and normalize BioPAX data. Since its release, the validator has become a critical tool for the pathway informatics community, detecting thousands of errors and helping substantially increase the conformity and uniformity of BioPAX-formatted data. The BioPAX Validator is open source and released under LGPL v3 license. All sources, binaries and documentation can be found at sf.net/p/biopax, and the latest stable version of the web application is available at biopax.org/validator.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

MeSH terms

  • Documentation
  • Internet
  • Software*