As the flood of critical biological information swells, medical researchers will drown in it unless it is creatively and effectively organized. Currently, Protein Reviews on the Web (PROW) is a pilot project to use human proteins as the organizing principle around which to build a conceptual web of biological concepts. Its success depends on our developing excellent strategies for organizing information and our tapping into the expertise of the biologic community to help develop and sustain such a resource. The end-product is a WWW resource/journal (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/prow) consisting of online authoritative reviews on human proteins (and their orthologs in other species) maintained by biological experts in the research community. Our comprehensive second-generation format for the CD guides is proving to be an excellent vehicle for summarizing information. Guides are now published in a citable journal format with an online ISSN of 1532-0405. Because of the very high quality of the published guides PROW has been approved by the National Library of Medicine for indexing in Medline. The utilization of PROW continues to be strong with utilization as high as 70,000 hits/month. We are making progress in developing the novel KBTool database design and efficient user interface to store and retrieve the complex web of information associated with biological entities and their associated research community. This database is the infrastructure on which PROW is based, enabling biological information to be viewed as an integrated fabric of information. A web-based system for viewing the data has been developed in Visual Studio.NET and is now in alpha testing. Tools for storing and viewing data on protein phosphorylation sites are also under development.
