An extensive effort is made by The Gene Ontology Consortium in order to gather all the protein – function pairs in a standard format and produce a well structured vocabulary that would present all the known biological functions in a hierarchical, controlled structure.

Here, we present a tool which takes advantage of the Gene Ontology (GO) to extract the proteins’ main attributes.

What is an Ontology?

An ontology is defined as a structured controlled vocabulary that represents a domain and is used to reason about the objects of that domain and the relationships between them.

The Gene Ontology is divided into three ontologies that were found to yield information common to all living organisms.

The Ontology of Cellular Component (CC) describes the places in the cell where gene products would be found

The Ontology of Molecular Function (MF) describes the biochemical activity of a gene product without specifying the time or the space where this event occurred. It is a usual feature for a molecular function term to be directly characterized by its annotated gene product.

The Ontology of Biological Process (BP) consists of one or more ordered assemblies of functions. There is a considerable relevance between molecular function and biological process ontologies.