•The GO project has developed three structured
controlled vocabularies (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:
¡Vdevelopment and maintenance of
the ontologies
¡Vannotation of gene products,
which entails making associations between the ontologies and the genes and gene products in the
collaborating databases
¡Vdevelopment of tools that
facilitate the creation, maintenance and use of ontologies.
•The use of GO terms by
collaborating databases facilitates uniform queries across them.