The rapidly increasing wealth of genomic data has driven the development of tools to assist in the task of representing and processing information about genes, their products and their functions. One of the most important of these tools is the Gene Ontology (GO), which is being developed in tandem with work on a variety of bioinformatics databases. An examination of the structure of GO, however...

Gene Ontology facilitates biomedical knowledge representation and efficient information management. The systematic representation and hierarchical structure of Gene Ontology bring forth great potential to examine data and information across the broad spectrum of biology. This article briefly discusses GO annotation and three interesting areas in Gene Ontology-facilitated genome analysis.