Searching the gene ontology terms using semantic similarity measure

Abstract

The most important property of the Gene Ontology is the terms. These control vocabularies are defined to provide consistent descriptions of gene products that are shareable and computationally accessible by humans, software agent, or other machine-readable meta-data. Each term is associated with information such as definition, synonyms, database references, amino acid sequences, and relationships to other terms. This information has made the Gene Ontology broadly applied in microarray and proteomic analysis. However, the process of searching the term is still carried out using traditional approach which is based on keyword matching. The weaknesses of this approach are: ignoring semantic relationships between terms, and highly depending on a specialist to find similar terms. Therefore, semantic similarity measure is used to compute similitude strength between terms and computational results are presented