GEO database: curation lagging behind submission?

GSE and GDS records in GEOmetadb by date

I was reading an old post that describes GEOmetadb, a downloadable database containing metadata from the GEO database. We had a brief discussion in the comments about the growth in GSE records (user-submitted) versus GDS records (curated datasets) over time. Below, some quick and dirty R code to examine the issue, using the Bioconductor GEOmetadb package and ggplot2. Left, the resulting image – click for larger version. Is the curation effort keeping up with user submissions? A little difficult to say, since GEOmetadb curation seems to have its own issues: (1) why do GDS records stop in 2008? (2) why do GDS (curated) records begin earlier than GSE (submitted) records?

library(GEOmetadb)
library(ggplot2)

# update database if required using getSQLiteFile()
# connect to database; assumed to be in user $HOME
con <- dbConnect(SQLite(), "~/GEOmetadb.sqlite")

# fetch "last updated" dates for GDS and GSE
gds <- dbGetQuery(con, "select update_date from gds")
gse <- dbGetQuery(con, "select last_update_date from gse")

# cumulative sums by date; no factor variables
gds.count <- as.data.frame(cumsum(table(gds)), stringsAsFactors = F)
gse.count <- as.data.frame(cumsum(table(gse)), stringsAsFactors = F)

# make GDS and GSE data frames comparable
colnames(gds.count) <- "count"
colnames(gse.count) <- "count"

# row names (dates) to real dates
gds.count$date <- as.POSIXct(rownames(gds.count))
gse.count$date <- as.POSIXct(rownames(gse.count))

# add type for plotting
gds.count$type <- "gds"
gse.count$type <- "gse"

# combine GDS and GSE data frames
gds.gse <- rbind(gds.count, gse.count)

# and plot records over time by type
png(filename = "geometadb.png", width = 800, height = 600)
print(ggplot(gds.gse, aes(date,count)) + geom_line(aes(color = type)))
dev.off()