From the website:
The Gene Ontology project is a major bioinformatics initiative with the aim of standardizing the representation of gene and gene product attributes across species and databases. The project provides a controlled vocabulary of terms for describing gene product characteristics and gene product annotation data from GO Consortium members, as well as tools to access and process this data.
I was encouraged by the following in the description of the project:
GO is not a way to unify biological databases (i.e. GO is not a ‘federated solution’). Sharing vocabulary is a step towards unification, but is not, in itself, sufficient. Reasons for this include the following:
Knowledge changes and updates lag behind.
Individual curators evaluate data differently. While we can agree to use the word ‘kinase’, we must also agree to support this by stating how and why we use ‘kinase’, and consistently apply it. Only in this way can we hope to compare gene products and determine whether they are related. GO does not attempt to describe every aspect of biology; its scope is limited to the domains described above. (emphasis added)
It is refreshing to see a project that acknowledges that sharing vocabulary is a major and worthwhile step.
One that falls short of universal unification.
[…] by the GO Ontology Consortium that I covered here, but I thought the tools merited separate […]
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