Development of data integration tools within functional genomics

Due to technological advances across all scientific domains, data is generated at an extremely fast pace. This is especially true in biology, where advances in computational and
sequencing technologies led to the necessity to develop automated methods for data analysis; thus the field of bioinformatics was born. This thesis focuses on one specific field within
bioinformatics - functional genomics. To be precise, in the development of techniques and
software for the integration of data to generate novel insights. Indeed, as the amount of
knowledge increases, so does the need to integrate it systematically. In this context, the
work described herein relates to the integration of multiple resources to improve the functional annotation of proteins, which led to the development of two bioinformatic tools - Mantis
and UniFunc. For the downstream integration and analysis of functional predictions, a network annotation tool was developed - UniFuncNet, which, together with the previous tools,
enables the efficient functional characterisation of individual organisms or communities.