Ontologies for life sciences: examples from the Gene Ontology
The document discusses ontologies for life sciences, using the Gene Ontology (GO) as an example. It provides an overview of GO, describing it as a way to capture biological knowledge for gene products in a written and computable form using a set of concepts and relationships arranged hierarchically. GO allows consistent descriptions of genes/gene products across databases. Model organism databases provide annotations connecting genes to GO terms. The GO is a collaborative effort to address the need for consistent descriptions of genes.