A platform for discovery, analysis and exploration of information from a number of topic-specific microbial knowledgebases. The knowledgebases include integrated information from published scientific literature and a number of major databases from biology fields. These include PubMed, ChEBI, Entrez Gene, GO, KOBAS, KEGG, REACTOME, UniPathways, PANTHER, BioGrid, etc.). Information exploration is enabled through a number of different ontologies, controlled vocabularies, taxonomy, and integrated information. Most of the concepts contained are normalized. DESM provides users with a number of tools to explore, filter and visualize enriched concepts and their associations.