Flexible Enrichment with Cortana – Software Demo

The software demonstration will introduce an open-source package, called Cortana, that simplifies and unifies the procedure of enriching a list, or ranking, of biological entities with background knowledge. A host of software applications already exists that can do this enrichment [2, 5, 9]. However, most are focused on enriching only a single kind of biological entity, eg. genes in the case of gene set enrichment [6], or they are concerned with only a single source of background knowledge, eg. biological processes from GO. As a result, these tools are by design limited in their ability to integrate background knowledge from a variety of domain-crossing sources. The software tool introduced here, Cortana, will allow integration of knowledge extracted from both existing sources, like the online knowledge bases [3, 4, 8] that are used by other enrichment tools, as well as custom made ones, created by, or available to, the end user.