The Gene Ontology and Its Annotation Sets

The Gene Ontology (GO) project is a collaborative effort to address the need for consistent descriptions of gene products across databases and for usage by researchers worldwide to describe their data. The GO project has developed three structured ontologies that describe gene products in terms of their associated biological processes, cellular components and molecular functions in a species-independent manner. There are three separate aspects to this effort: first, the development and maintenance of the ontologies themselves; second, the annotation of gene products, which entails making associations between the ontologies and the genes and gene products in the collaborating databases; and third, the development of tools that facilitate the creation, maintenance and use of ontologies. In this presentation, I will address these three aspects but will focus  on the process of expert manual curation and explain what is available for use by this community and how this community can contribute themselves.