Plant & Animal Genomes XI Conference Plant & Animal Genomes XI ConferenceJanuary 11-15, 2003
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
Workshop: Bioinformatics Interfaces, Ontologies and Interoperability
The main goal of the Gene Ontology (GO) project is to use controlled vocabularies to address the growing need for meaningful annotation of genes and their products in different organisms. The Gene Ontology (GO) project is developing controlled vocabularies describing three key aspects of molecular biology: molecular function, biological process, and cellular component. Two other key aspects of the GO project are the application of GO terms in annotating genes or gene products and the development of a community resource including software for querying, displaying, and manipulating ontologies and annotations.
Many important aspects of biology are not covered by the GO vocabularies. For example, the GO vocabularies do not describe sequence features, they do not model protein-protein interactions, and they do not describe mutant or disease phenotypes. To complement GO vocabulary development, the GO consortium supports the development of other bio-ontologies by providing a web site, Global Open Biology Ontologies (GOBO), for developers to post emerging structured shared controlled vocabularies for use within the genomics and proteomics domains. We hope to encourage the design of a range of ontologies for the general genomics and proteomics domain.
There are five criteria for inclusion in GOBO: openness, sharable syntax (such as the GO syntax or DAML+OIL), orthogonality to other GOBO ontologies, shared ID space, and term definitions.
GO Consortium home page: http://www.geneontology.org