GO Visual Browser

Abstract

Biologists commonly annotate genome and protein properties using ontology terms. While biologists have a deep understanding of the underlying biology, they rarely have a good understanding of the semantic networks used to represent domain ontologies. This paper presents the design and implementation of the GO Visual Browser: a new tool to provide visualization of Gene Ontology terms and relationships, as well as retrieval of associated genomic data. Browsing involves selecting a term and type of ontology relationship, and then displaying an interactive map with all of the related terms. This map can then be used to search a genome database for all features, related sequences, and metadata annotated with the selected ontology terms. Our code is fully functional and is being distributed as open source software.