The growth in glycobiological data from high throughtput technologies and the need to mine this data, has led to the increased efforts to catalogue protein glycosylation as well as glycan-binding events. This drives the expansion of glycoinformatics that is needed to corroborate and analyse those events that are often reported separately. To address this need, Glyco@Expasy is a web portal hosting resources that, when combined, suggest a view of glycans as mediators of protein-protein interactions. The first step in building this picture, entails considering glycan structures as a focal point of chemistry, biochemistry and structural biology. This approach will be illustrated with questions and examples arising from the analysis of publicly available data.