Abstract

The development of the Functional Genomics Experiment Ontology (FuGO) is a collaborative, international effort which will provide a resource for annotating functional genomics experiments, including the study design, protocols and instrumentation used, the data generated and the types of analysis performed on the data. FuGO will contain terms that are both universal to functional genomics experiments and those that are domain specific. In this way, the ontology will serve as the ‘semantic glue’ to provide a common understanding of data across these disparate data sources. In addition, FuGO will reference out to existing mature ontologies in order to avoid the need to duplicate these resources, but in such a way as to enable their ease of use in annotation. This project is in the beginning stages of development and the paper will describe the efforts to initiate the project, the scope and organization of the project, the work accomplished to date and the challenges encountered as well as describe future plans.