New member onboarding

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Welcome to the GO Consortium!

This page explains how to join and contribute to the Gene Ontology project, either as a biocurator, a software developer, or to provide feedback on the ontology or the annotations.

Project organization

The Gene Ontology project is a consortium made up of different groups and people associated with the project to various degree. We welcome contributions from anyone.

There are different groups within the project (see also sidebar 'GOC Project' menu):

  • Annotation: Responsible for training and guiding biocurators in correctly applying GO terms to gene products. This group also includes phylogenetic annotation, annotation inferences across evolutionary related proteins based on known function of proteins within PANTHER phylogenetic family trees (annotations can be view with the Pantree browser).
  • Ontology: This group is responsible for maintaining the ontology itself, and related products such as links to other resources.
  • Quality Control: Ensures the integrity of the ontology and the annotations.
  • Outreach: Responsible for the GO public presence and communication with the general research community, via the GO website, Twitter, the GO helpdesk, etc.
  • Software and Utilities: Develops and implement the software required to build the ontology, generate annotations (Noctua), and view annotations (AmiGO).
  • GO Managers oversee and prioritize projects.

Communication

  • Phone conferences. The different groups meet on a regular basis via phone conferencing (zoom). Meetings are announced by email on one of the mailing lists, and are listed in the GO Google calendar. Follow the steps in the New members: joining the GO project section of this document.
  • GOC consortium meetings. The GO consortium meets twice a year, alternating between American and European locations. Information about meetings can be found here: Consortium_Meetings_and_Workshops. Meetings are also announced on the go-consortium mailing list.

Project management: GitHub

  • The GO consortium uses GitHub to track tasks for the various aspects of the project: software development, ontology maintenance, annotation issues, etc. See Instructions for GitHub for GO for details.
  • Within GitHub, group of related tasks are organized into 'projects'. See GO projects for details.

Background reading on Ontologies, the Gene Ontology and Annotation

Formal ontology and the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)

Taxon constraints

Relations ontology

OBO Foundry

New members: joining the GO project

Checklist for all Gene Ontology Consortium Members and Contributors

  1. Create a GitHub account at GitHub
    • Check your mail (including spam), and accept the invitation when you receive it.
  2. Get an ORCID at ORCID
  3. Create a ticket in the geneontology/go-site repo to request to (please copy the following list in the ticket):
    • Be invited to the Gene Ontology Project: Please mention your role: Biocurator, software developer or domain expert.
    • Get access to GO google drive: Please provide the email account you want to use
    • Be added to the GO Google calendar, so you can view conference call information
    • Be added to Group contacts: Please provide your expertise (1-3 keywords) and
    • Be added to Users: Please provide your ORCID, the name of your organization, and group.
  4. Sign up to the GO-consortium mailing list. This also gives you emails to go-friends and go-discuss.

Checklist for new Biocurators

Checklist for new Software Developers

Checklist for new Ontology Editors

Checklist for new GO Managers

Useful links

Key contacts

Role Name GitHub handle email
Project management Pascale Gaudet @pgaudet pascalegaudet-at-swib.swiss
Technical Lead Seth Carbon @kltm sjcarbon-at-lbl.gov
Outreach Suzi Alexander @suzialeksander suzia-at-stanford.edu
Annotation Kimberly VanAuken @vanaukenk vanauken-at-caltech.edu
Ontology David Hill @ukemi david.hill-at-jax.org
Phylogenetic Annotation Huaiyu Mi @huaiyumi huaiyumi-at-usc.edu