Annotation outreach group meeting 2nd March 2007

Time: 3 PM GMT - 10 AM EST - 9AM CST - 7 AM PST

Attending: Jen, Evelyn, Rama, Michelle, Fiona, Pascale.

AGENDA

1. Review Action Items from last meeting
2. Discuss SOP Flowcharts
3. Metrics

Actions Items from Last meeting.

Jen has provided her outreach contact list as text under “Outreach Records”, “Text Version”: http://gocwiki.geneontology.org/index.php/Text_Version

Flowcharts for SOPs to begin annotation are posted: http://gocwiki.geneontology.org/index.php/Flowcharts

Everyone consider how they prioritize annotation outreach.

EBI Flyers circulated.

Jen contacted Fiona.

Discussion of SOP Flowcharts

SOP annotation flowcharts are required for new GO annotators and are intended to be used for flyers. PIs would like to see an abbreviated form on the GO website.

Ev: has provided IEA flowchart based on GOA procedure: http://gocwiki.geneontology.org/index.php/Electronic_-_Harold_and_Evelyn

Michelle: can send more information about what is done at TIGR to Ev and that can be added into the IEA flowchart. TIGR has PFAM mappings to GO and is willing to send these to GO cvs via Karen.

Ev: GOA would be interested in having these mappings available.

Ev: need to be able to clearly distinguish between IEA annotations and ISS annotations based on domains.

Jen: the flow charts currently have too much jargon; on the website we will be make some of these terms clickable so that users can see find more information.

Require Harold to look at the IEA flowchart and comment.

Fi: The point of IEA for new users to add breadth of coverage. This can be done by building up layers, starting with InterPro2GO. Is this general?

Michelle & Ev: For microbes, HAMAP and TIGRFAMs give the most specificity but InterPro gives the most coverage.

Jen: Since the flow charts are still evolving, best to leave in text for now. Also, for a non-annotator there is a lot of information in these flowcharts. It would be best to go through these and write down questions that occur to use as help documentation.

ACTION ITEM: Jen to go through the flowcharts, looking for potential questions and use this to build help documentation.

Ev: We didn’t have the space to elaborate on how the mappings are done for IEA.

Michelle: It is important to remember that if annotators start with IEA annotations as the basis for their manual annotations, it predisposes them to only look at those GO terms or that area of the ontology. This is not always the best approach.

Ev: It appears that we need to get more input on these flowcharts. It is important that Harold comment on them and GOA annotators can also look over them.

Jen: We also need to make sure that the flowcharts are described in terms biologists would use.

Outreach members will seek more input on the flowcharts as they stand now before moving on to try and link them together.

Prioritization

Jen: We need to look at how we establish our work priorities and try to set that down.

Rama: Uses email as a daily prioritization.

Jen: Uses Outreach meetings and action items to priorities tasks.

Ev: User queries need to be top priority.

Jen: PIs have asked to see priorities, and how these priorities are assigned. We should all make a priority list of the GO related things we do, taking into account how much time we are assigned to work on GO & how much time we spend on outreach.

Pascale: If we do this for only ourselves it will be a skewed sample. Better to do it for all members of each of our groups.

Michelle: To clarify, not all of us are paid for by the GOC Grant.

Jen: Perhaps make a note of whether or not your work is paid for by the GOC Grant?

Fi: We can calculate how much of our time is spent on GO and how much of that is spent on outreach.

Pascale: Perhaps we can look at how we split our time in the case of special tasks and then during regular hours. <Pascale: my notes degenerate here, perhaps you could clarify or add to this?>

Jen and Pascale have added information about the priorities that we all set in our individual work here: http://gocwiki.geneontology.org/index.php/Priorities

Please add to this information.

Metrics

Ev: At the last meeting we discussed outreach metrics; perhaps we should look at what it is we are measuring, what is “outreach”? It would have to be getting annotations for new species but we do a lot of groundwork for this sometime. For example, working to get mappings takes a lot of time.

Rama: Outreach should be defined as targeting new groups to provide GO annotations.

Jen: Outreach is to facilitate new GO annotations by getting new annotator groups.

Rama: Then the metrics should be how many new groups have we contacted. The first metric would be to identify the new groups. This list can be divided into groups with and without a genome sequence.

Action item: We should all think about good metrics to help us measure how successful our outreach is and to help us prioritize our outreach effort where it is most effective.

Jen has added information about Outreach metrics here: http://gocwiki.geneontology.org/index.php/Metrics

Next meeting is at Time: 3 PM GMT - 10 AM EST - 9AM CST - 7 AM PST 16th March.