Measuring coherence between electronic and manual annotations in biological databases

The use of controlled structured vocabularies for annotation purposes, such as the Gene Ontology (GO) is currently one of the strategies to cope with the increasingly cumbersome task of genome annotation. The Gene Ontology Annotation Database (GOA) uses GO to annotate gene products through curated literature analysis and uncurated electronic methods. Although electronic annotations constitute the large majority of annotations (over 95%), most researchers are reluctant to use them in their studies, since they are regarded as having a lower quality than curated ones. Assessing the quality of electronic annotations may help clarify the advantages and disadvantages of their use. This paper proposes a preliminary measure of electronic annotation quality based on the coherence between electronic and manual annotations. Coherence is analysed both at the gene product and at the annotation level, based on semantic similarity of Gene Ontology terms. We have found that average annotation coheren...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SAC
• Authors: Catia Pesquita, Daniel Faria, Francisco M. Couto
• Keywords: Annotation, Applied Computing, Electronic Annotation, Gene Ontology, SAC 2009