BELIEF dashboard - a web-based curation interface to support generation of BEL networks

The relevance of network-based approaches in systems biology to achieve a better understanding of biological mechanisms has increased enormously. The Biological Expression Language (BEL) is well designed to collate findings from scientific literature into biological network models. To facilitate encoding and biocuration of such findings in BEL, a free and user-friendly web-based curation interface called BELIEF Dashboard has been developed. The interface incorporates an information extraction workflow to support the biocurator with text mining techniques. BELIEF Dashboard allows easy curation of generated BEL statements and their context annotations. It also visualizes the evidence sentences and highlights detected named entities with their disambiguated normalized names. Resulting BEL statements and their context annotations can be syntactically and semantically verified which ensures consistency in the BEL network. Additional sys-tem functionalities provide a document management system, the retrieval of citation information from PubMed, a search interface for OpenBEL namespaces and annotation definitions, and also the export of valid BEL documents. In summary, the curation tool supports experts in different stages of systems biology network building. We show that BEL coding with BELIEF Dashboard reduces the curation effort and improves the efficiency.