Estimating the Quality of Ontology-Based Annotations by Considering Evolutionary Changes

Ontology-based annotations associate objects, such as genes and proteins, with well-defined ontology concepts to semantically and uniformly describe object properties. Such annotation mappings are utilized in different applications and analysis studies whose results strongly depend on the quality of the used annotations. To study the quality of annotations we propose a generic evaluation approach considering the annotation generation methods (provenance) as well as the evolution of ontologies, object sources, and annotations. Thus, it facilitates the identification of reliable annotations, e.g., for use in analysis applications. We evaluate our approach for functional protein annotations in Ensembl and Swiss-Prot using the Gene Ontology.