Ideally, annotations are curated manually, however manual curation is costly, time consuming and requires expert knowledge and training.
Devoted expert curators produce quality annotations, but because manual curation is time-consuming and there is a limited number of curators, it is difficult to keep current with the literature.
Hence, it is observed that to curate the pathway-related information, manual curation is the most accepted procedure till now.
Manual curation is an ongoing process, thus additional secreted proteins will be manually curated and integrated into the database with time.
However, the current database model, based on manual curation, is not sustainable because the limited support is not compatible with complete and accurate coverage of published information.
Despite progress in knowledge-based automation of development and maintenance of vocabularies, manual curation is still the main method of determining synonymy.
It is obvious that such manual curation is time consuming and this task becomes more challenging with the increasing scope and volume of available data.
As is immediately obvious to anyone who has worked with patents, to achieve this by means of manual curation is far from trivial but seems almost impossible when using automation.
Furthermore, manual curation is subjective.
