Outreach & Dissemination Progress Report December 2015

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Outreach and Usability:

AmiGO2

AmiGO2, the GOC’s tool for querying, browsing, and visualizing the GO database, continues to be updated regularly with many improvements and increased documentation. This year’s upgrades continue to expand on the variety of search modes, as well as availability of data types. Approximately 200 small issues have been closed. Largely these were aimed refinement of features and were accomplished without any disruption to services (hot swap). In addition considerable work has been carried out in preparation for all GO services to transition to Berkeley, including an increased number of unit tests and improved status reporting.

GOC website

Throughout this year we have continued to improve the documentation on our website, refining content for both clarity and brevity. A total of 83 FAQs are now available on the GO website covering a variety of topics from annotation, to analysis, to mappings. Special emphasis was given to improving documentation on how to conduct term enrichment analyses using tools supported by the GOC as well as third-party tools, and documentation on how to submit annotations and contribute to the ontology.

GO Help Desk

In 2015, members of the GO Help Desk team responded to 298 requests for information and help while resolving and closing 317 tickets (between 2015-01-01 and 2015-11-16).

Collaborations

We initiated a new collaboration for ontology development and annotation with the Synapse group, an international knowledge representation effort to better support neuroscience research. More on this?

User Survey

We devised and implemented a GO user survey to query our users about their needs and collect their feedback, so we can implement better solutions. To this aim, we consulted with User Experience specialists at one of the partner institutions and collated feedback from several rounds of internal testing. We sent out the survey to a broad but targeted array of mailing lists (for a total of 11 different survey collectors), and received ~600 responses.

First GO Symposium Day

In August 2015, as part of the annual meeting of the Gene Ontology Consortium in Washington, DC, we organized a day of talks and discussions centered around the GO. The GO Symposium day was open to the general public, and attendees included researchers, faculty, and students from local institutions as well as NIH senior personnel. The sessions included two talks and two workshops. The talks were offered by our guest speakers [Dr. Dona Slonim] and Dr. Trey Ideker. The workshop on Annotation included details on the use and implementation of GOC standards and tools. Lastly, the second workshop was focused on Term Enrichment Analysis using the resources of the GOC. Further details regarding the symposium are available from the agenda website].