New member onboarding
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). Note that members of the different groups may overlap.
- Annotation: Responsible for developing annotation guidelines, as well as training and guiding biocurators in applying GO terms correctly 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 Documentation for 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.
All new members: joining the GO project
Checklist for all Gene Ontology Consortium Members and Contributors
- Create a GO wiki account
- Create a GitHub account at GitHub
- Check your mail (including spam), and accept the invitation when you receive it.
- Get an ORCID at ORCID
- Create a ticket in the Helpdesk 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)
- Be added to Users: Please provide your ORCID, the name of your organization, and group.
- Sign up to the GO-consortium mailing list. This also gives you emails to go-friends and go-discuss.
Checklist for new Biocurators
- Annotation documentation: Annotation, including Noctua documentation.
- Communication:
- Attend Annotation and GO-CAM conference calls (on Tuesdays; see the GO Google calendar for details).
- GitHub: Biocurators should be following the ontology and annotation GitHub repositories.
- For queries or feedback on specific tools, see the list of our Main repositories and their scope.
- go-annotation Gitter: Live chat with other GO curators.
- Slack: Genome Alliance Function Group Slack.
Checklist for new Software Developers
- Relevant orgs: http://github.com/geneontology/
- See all pinned repos
- Javascript libs
- OWLTools
- APIs, python
- ontobio documentation (Python)
- Noctua Stack technical docs
- For continuous Integration, we use Travis for per-repo checks
- Communication:
- https://groups.io/g/godev-internal/
- Slack: function group on alliance slack
- Gitter (for developers)
Checklist for new Ontology Editors
- Read the Ontology Editors manual: Ontology Development documentation.
- Subscribe to the
go-ontology email list
. - Be sure to follow the Ontology GitHub repository.
- Get an id range in go-idranges.owl.
- Do the GO Protege/OWL tutorial.
Checklist for new GO Managers
- Subscribe to the
go-managers email list
. - Attend weekly calls: GO Managers calls agendas and minutes.
Useful links
Key contacts
Role | Name | GitHub handle | |
---|---|---|---|
Project management | Pascale Gaudet | @pgaudet | pascalegaudet-at-swib.swiss |
Technical Lead | Seth Carbon | @kltm | sjcarbon-at-lbl.gov |
Bioinformatics Outreach | Laurent-Philippe Albou | @lpalbou | albou-at-usc.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 |
User Support | Suzi Aleksander | @suzialeksander | suzia-at-stanford.edu |
Review Status
Last reviewed: April 11, 2019