BOL

The GO knowledgebase is composed of two primary components:

• the Gene Ontology (GO), which provides the logical structure of the biological functions (‘terms’) and their relationships to one another, manifested as a directed acyclic graph
• the corpus of GO annotations, evidence-based statements relating a specific gene product (a protein, non-coding RNA, or macromolecular complex, which we often refer to as ‘genes’ for simplicity) to a specific ontology term

Together, the ontology and annotations aim to describe a comprehensive model of biological systems. Currently, the GO knowledgebase includes experimental findings from over 140 000 published papers, represented as over 600 000 experimentally-supported GO annotations. These provide the core dataset for additional inference of over 6 million functional annotations for a diverse set of organisms spanning the tree of life.

In addition to this core knowledgebase, GOC resources also include software to edit and perform logical reasoning over the ontologies, web access to the ontology and annotations, and analytical tools that use the GO knowledgebase to support biomedical research.