Computer Science and Engineering, Department of
Date of this Version
2011
Citation
Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Technical Report, TR-UNL-CSE-2011-0012
Abstract
When using the Gene Ontology (GO), nucleotide and amino acid sequences are annotated by terms in a structured and controlled vocabulary organized into relational graphs. The usage of the vocabulary (GO terms) in the annotation of these sequences may diverge from the relations defined in the ontology. We measure the consistency of the use of GO terms by comparing GO's defined structure to the terms' application. To do this, we first use synthetic data with different characteristics to understand how these characteristics in sequence the correlation values determined by various similarity measures. Using these results as a baseline, we found that the correlation between GO's definition and its application to real data is relatively low, suggesting that GO annotations might not be applied in a manner consistent with its definition. In contrast, we found a sub-ontology of GO that correlates well with its usage in UniProtKB.
Comments
Copyright 2011 University of Nebraska-Lincoln.