Developing and Using the Gene Ontology
Midori A. Harris
(European Bioinformatics Institute, EMBL-EBI)
The Gene Ontology (GO) project (http://www.geneontology.org/)
constructs and uses ontologies to facilitate the biologically
meaningful annotation of genes and their products in a wide variety of
organisms. The GO ontologies describe gene product attributes in three
key biological domains: molecular function, biological process, and
cellular component. Within GO, terms and relationships can be added,
refined, and reorganized as biological knowledge advances. Although
the GO vocabularies were originally developed for the description of
gene products in databases, GO terms and annotations have also been
used for a variety of other applications, including data and text
mining. The GO project has also provided a model for the development
of ontologies for additional aspects of biology, many of which are now
publicly available from the Open Biomedical Ontologies web site
(http://obo.sourceforge.net/).