The Goals of the Gene Ontology Consortium
| 1. To compile a comprehensive structured vocabulary of terms describing different elements of molecular biology that are shared among life forms. |
| - Terms are defined, may have synonyms and are organized into broader and narrower refinements. |
| - Separate vocabularies are used to define separate dimensions of biology. |
| 2. To describe biological objects (in the model organism database of each contributing member) using these terms. |
| 3. To provide tools for querying and manipulating these vocabularies. |
| - To add new vocabularies for additional aspects of biology. |
| - To permit researchers to locate both terms and biological objects either via the Web or in more complex ways. |
| - To allow others to set up satellite databases. |
| 4. To provide tools enabling curators to assign GO terms to biological objects. |
| - Sequence-based methods |
| - Editorial annotations |
| - Microarrays |
| - Protein binding experiments |
| WHAT GO IS NOT: |
| 1. GO is not a way to unify biological databases. Sharing nomenclature is a step toward unification, but is not, in itself, sufficient. |
| 2. GO is not a dictated standard, mandating nomenclature across databases. Groups participate because of self-interest and cooperate to arrive at a consensus. |
| 3. GO does not define homologies between gene products from different organisms. The use of the GO results in shared annotations for gene products from different organisms, and this may reflect an evolutionary relationship, but the shared annotation is in itself not sufficient for such a determination. |