GOC Activities

The BHF-UCL team are members of the Gene Ontology Consortium (GOC), and participate in the development of the ontology as well as discussions about improving the consistancy of annotation practice.

Ontology Development

As well as providing GO annotations to human proteins, the BHF-UCL team is involved in several ontology development projects, which are ongoing.

Topic	Date of project start	Involvement
Cardiovascular lipoprotein metabolism	November 2007	Ruth has been working with cardiovascular lipoprotein experts to develop the process, function and component terms for describing biological characteristics of lipoproteins.
Heart development	January 2009	Varsha has been working on heart development and organised a 1 day workshop in September 2009 with heart development experts, GO editors and GO annotators from several model organism databases, to develop the ontology in this area.  Following on from this successful workshop, Varsha is leading the Reference Genome project to annotate transcription factors involved in heart development.
Signaling	March 2009	Ruth has been working on the signaling ontology and helped to organise a 2 day workshop in February 2011 to refine the representation of signaling within the gene ontology.  The workshop involved signalling experts, GO editors and GO annotators.
Cardiac conduction	January 2010	Ruth and Varsha have been looking at the representation of cardiac conduction in the gene ontology.  Ruth is organising a workshop in November 2011 to develop the ontology in this area.
Apoptosis	February 2011	Ruth has been working on the apoptosis ontology and attended a 1 day workshop in June 2011 to refine the representation of apoptosis within the gene ontology.

Annotation guidelines

The BHF-UCL team is also involved the formulation of a number of annotation guidelines, as part of the Annotation Advocacy and Coordination team created by the GOC.

Topic	Date	Involvement
Binding	January 2009	Ruth has been chairing the binding working group which is formulating guidelines for the useage of binding terms.
Downstream processes	April - July 2010	Rachael Huntley (GOA) and Varsha co-chaired the 'downstream' working group, to formulate guidelines for the annotation of downstream processes.
Response to	April - July 2010	Ruth and Varsha were part of the 'response to' working group formulating guidelines to standardise the use of 'response to' GO terms.
Regulation	April - July 2010	Ruth and Varsha were part of the 'regulation' working group creating guidelines to standardise the use of 'regulation' GO terms.

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The work of the Cardiovascular Gene Ontology Annotation group is supported by British Heart Foundation grant SP/07/007/23671