A Short Study on the Success of the Gene Ontology
6 Pages Posted: 23 Jun 2018 Publication Status: Accepted
Abstract
While most ontologies have been used only by the groups who created them and for their initially defined purposes, the Gene Ontology (GO), an evolving structured controlled vocabulary of nearly 16,000 terms in the domain of biological functionality, has been widely used for annotation of biological-database entries and in biomedical research. As a set of learned lessons offered to other ontology developers, we list and briefly discuss the characteristics of GO that we believe are most responsible for its success: community involvement; clear goals; limited scope; simple, intuitive structure; continuous evolution; active curation; and early use.
Keywords: Gene Ontology, ontology development, biological database, annotation
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation