Bioconductor does not only contain analysis packages, but also a good suite of data packages, frozen from the most important data sources for bioinformatics (e.g. EBI, NCBI, UCSC, etc..).
These data packages are useful because because they allow to access certain biological relevant data quickly and without having to manually download them from the web. They are used internally by several analysis packages (e.g. to calculate ontology enrichment, get gene coordinates, etc..), and in a way they improve the reproducibility of your analysis, because by updating them within R you will access to the same version of the data frozen as for anybody else using them.
This slideshow provides a quick summary of all the data annotation packages available, how to use them and how this part of bioconductor is evolving.
I’ve prepared the slideshow for the second workshop at the Programming for Evolutionary Biology in Belgrade I’ve presented this year. It is probably less glamorous than the Bash slideshow, as there are no hidden cows, however it may be more useful, specially if you use Bioconductor regularly.
Disclaimer: I am not a bioconductor developer, but just an user. So apologies if I wrote anything wrong 🙂