The objective of GRECO is to integrate and consolidate the ongoing work of the many individual teams and consortia that take care of gene regulation knowledge and augment a virtual integration of their resources. We will contribute to this by evaluating and aligning existing standards, protocols and procedures for managing knowledge, and by developing new knowledge description standards, ontologies and annotation approaches that are customized to enable the integration of complementary and valuable types of knowledge generated by emerging new technologies. GRECO partners focus on:

• further maturation of ontologies to provide for a comprehensive and useful description of the content of existing and anticipated gene regulatory resources;
• the adoption of common protocols for identifying, validating and archiving content (gene regulation components, their functions and (causal) interactions);
• development and broad use of efficient data exchange standards;
• the development of text mining algorithms that will identify sentences and text parts holding information about any specific subdomain of gene regulation.