What is finished, and why does it matter

Our ability to acquire and analyze DNA sequence data has increased phenomenally in the past 12 years. The acquisition of both cDNA and genomic DNA sequence has exerted a major influence on the direction of biological and medical research and will continue to do so. However, the DNA sequencing field has progressed so rapidly that technical differences between various sequencing approaches have resulted in large datasets of differing quality. Although all of these datasets are valuable in their own right, they are composed of experimental data; therefore they are subject to errors, ambiguities, and incompleteness at a level related to the experimental strategy that created them. The picture is further complicated by the lack of a community-accepted nomenclature that clearly defines levels of sequence completeness. Because of the small number of people producing this resource relative to the large number using it, the nature of the data is, unfortunately, not commonly appreciated....