Public repositories provide access to biological networks for investigations, and subsequently serve to distribute the network encoded biomedical and even clinically relevant results. However, inclusion of complementary information requires data structures and implementations customized to the integrated data for network representation, usage in supporting application, and extending analysis functionality. Partitioning of this information into individual aspects of a network facilitates compatibility and reusability of the network-based results, but also requires support and accessibility of the extensions and their implementations. The RCX extension hub offers overview and access to extensions of the Cytoscape exchange format implemented in R. The hub supports the realization of self-customized extension through guides, example implementations, and a template for the creation of R extension packages.
Keywords: Bioinformatics; R; biological networks; data models; extensibility.