The http://www.uniprot.org website [17] is the primary access point to our data and documentation and to tools such as full text and field-based text search, sequence similarity search, multiple sequence alignment, batch retrieval and database identifier mapping. These tools can be accessed directly through a tool bar that appears at the top of every page. Most data (including documentation and help) can be searched through the full text search, which allows searches requiring no prior knowledge of our data or search syntax. Results are sorted by relevance and, where possible, suggestions are provided to help refine searches that yield too many or no results. The field-based text search supports more complex queries. These can be built iteratively with the tool bar's; query builder or entered manually in the query field, which can be faster and more powerful (http://www.uniprot.org/help/text-search). Searching with ontology terms is assisted by auto-completion, and we also provide the possibility of using ontologies to browse search results. Viewing of result sets, as well as database entries, is configurable. The site has a simple and consistent URL scheme and
