GO is the designation of a project as well as the product of the project.

Starting with the cellular level, we are not distinguishing cell types, organs,

etc.

Gene Ontology is a collaboration between the fly (FlyBase), mouse (MGD) genome databases, and yeast (SGD).  All three groups had started independent projects to produce controlled vocabularies for the biology of their organisms.

You will all be familiar with hierarchical system to classify enzymes (EC) or functions (YPD, SwissPROT, MIPS, …).

We have divided our project into the creation of three ontologies.  These are not necessarily hierarchical rather they can be a network of associations -- a directed acyclic graph (DAG).

Process:  cell cycle, nutrient transport, behavior, 

Function: alcohol dehydrogenase,

Cellular Location: organelle, protein complex, subcellular compartment