关键词：后基因组时代；元数据；生物信息学；生物医学
摘 要：The post-genomic era is producing an enormous volume of data. Efficient applications and protocols are necessary in Bioinformatics to deal with this information. One of the most-challenging goals is the integration of knowledge extracted from different biological databases. Emerging ontologies in Molecular biology are very promising tools to provide sequence annotation standards that can be shared among genome annotation projects. The Gene Ontology (GO) is the most popular vocabulary to assign biological functions to genes, accordingly to evidence obtained from literature or computationally inferred. GO characterization of gene products is now an essential step of each genome annotation pipeline. Genome curators can use, in addition, auxiliar ontologies to describe biological sequences and alignments. The Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) consortium, a joint effort of bioinformatics and biomedical communities, has recently defined a common framework to standardize the ontologies developed in different fields. This chapter provides a comprehensive description of GO and other similar ontologies to annotate genome products.