KEGG BRITE is a collection of manually created hierarchical text (htext) files capturing functional hierarchies of various biological objects, especially those represented as KEGG objects. Some BRITE hierarchy files contain tab-delimited attributes that are added manually or computationally. BRITE table files are now used to focus more on such multi-column attributes rather than hierarchy relationships. In contrast to KEGG PATHWAY, which is limited to molecular interactions and reactions, KEGG BRITE incorporates many different types of relationships including: KEGG BRITE is the reference database for brite mapping in KEGG Mapper.

The following binary relation files may be used in the KEGG Mapper tool Join Brite to computationally extend the Brite hierarchy file.