DAS/1

The DAS/1 Protocol

About DAS/1

The original version 1 specification, written by Lincoln Stein, Sean Eddy, and Robin Dowell, is the basis for a number of clients and servers. Around 400 public DAS/1 servers are currently running worldwide including WormBase, FlyBase, Ensembl, TIGR, UCSC, and UniProt. Many more private DAS sources are known to be in use. A number of websites and software applications are based on DAS.

The official DAS/1 version 1.53 specification is available at http://www.biodas.org/documents/spec.html

The specification is being actively supported, and continues to be extended in order to cater for the needs of its existing users and expand its applicability to additional arenas. For example, though originally focussed on genomic annotation, extensions have enabled DAS to be used to distribute alignment, structural and molecular interaction data.

The unofficial DAS/1 version 1.53E (extended) specification is available at http://www.dasregistry.org/spec_1.53E.jsp

DAS/1/Overview provides a glossary and list of concepts. DAS Plans has some details of possible future improvements to DAS.

DAS/1 Clients

• Ensembl
• Spice
• Dasty
• Pfam
• STRAPalso directly accessible here STRAP
• DASher

• Older (still maintained?):
  • Geodesic
  • OmniDAS/OmniGene

DAS/1 Servers

A more exchaustive list of servers is available from the DAS Registry.

• Affymetrix
• BioSapiens servers
• Ensembl server
• KEGG DAS
• Sanger DAS server
• EBI Genomic DAS server
• EBI Protein DAS server
• Uniprot DAS server
• TIGR's listing of servers
• UCSC server

How to set up a DAS/1 server

In general it is quite easy to set up DAS server. All the server implementations are easy to set up. Most server implementations allow easy setup using ready provided data-adaptors (e.g. for GFF files). For custom data simple plugins can be written to quickly provide your data via DAS.

DAS server implementations are available in several programming languages:

• Perl

Proserver
LDAS

• Java

Dazzle
MyDas

• Validation

Validation RelaxNG documents are now available to help validate the xml produced by your servers. It is intended that these will be used by the registry to help servers conform to the DAS1 specification before being registered.

Publishing and Discovery of DAS/1 sources

See DasRegistry

Training in DAS

DAS Tutorials, talks and hackathons take place once a year at the Genome Campus UK almost every year in the DAS Workshop]. The next workshop is likely to be in March 2010.