As I am an international student, Ontology is rather an abstract term to me. At the beginning of the lecture given by Dr. Fridsma, I even thought it was a Philosophy concept. (I said to myself, “wow, we even study Philosophy. Maybe that’s why we are called ‘Ph’.D students.”). Though gradually, I realized that it was an informatics term, I finally left that class in a fog. The referenced articles provided in this blog are very helpful. After reading the article of Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology, I recalled that I have actually been exposed to the concept of Gene Ontology ever since my undergraduate stage. I majored in Biology for my undergraduate study. In order to search for a particular piece of information, such as a protein or a gene, biology researchers always spend large amount of time and effort in searching in different databases. Worse more, different databases usually use different terminologies, which make the searching both by computer and people more difficult. Gene Ontology is a project aimed at solving this dilemma.
The most authoritative explanation of Gene Ontology can be found in http://www.geneontology.org/GO.doc.shtml
Posted by Jing Lu
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