Creating the gene ontology resource: Design and implementation

The exponential growth in the volume of accessible biological information h as generated a confusion of voices surrounding the annotation of molecular information about genes and their products. The Gene Ontology (GO) project seeks to provide a set of structured vocabularies for specific biological d omains that can be used to describe gene products in any organism. This wor k includes building three extensive ontologies to describe molecular functi on, biological process, and cellular component, and providing a community d atabase resource that Supports the use of these ontologies. The GO Consorti um was initiated by scientists associated with three model organism databas es: SGD, the Saccharomyces Genome database; FlyBase, the Drosophila genome database; and MGD/GXD, the Mouse Genome Informatics databases. Additional m odel organism database groups are joining the project. Each of these model organism information systems is annotating genes and gene products using GO vocabulary terms and incorporating these annotations into their respective model organism databases. Each database contributes its annotation files t o a shared GO data resource accessible to the public at http://www.geneonto logy.org/. The GO site can be used by the community both to recover the GO vocabularies and to access the annotated gene product data sets from the mo del organism databases. The GO Consortium supports the development of the G O database resource and provides tools enabling curators and researchers to query and manipulate the vocabularies. We believe that the shared developm ent of this molecular annotation resource will contribute to the unificatio n of biological information.