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Abstract
Qrator is a tool for curating and populating glycan structures into the Glycomics Ontology (GlycO). It takes glycan structures from various web based glycan databases and converts them to an interoperable XML format and then to a Java Object model which represents them as a tree structure. An ecient tree-structure alignment algorithm is imple- mented, similar to a sequence alignment algorithm, but for a branched tree structures. The tree matching results in a list of glycan structures in descending order of similarity to a canonical representation of acceptable structures, as implemented in the GlycO ontology. All the matching and partially matching structures can be viewed graphically along with suggestions for editing structures to make them match exactly with canonical representation. When a perfect match is found, Qrator adds the input structure to GlycO. When the input structure does not match perfectly, it provides a convenient way to edit the input structure and revalidate the edited structure with by comparison to the canonical representation in GlycO.