Exploring Gene Ontology Annotations with OWL

Ontologies such as the Gene Ontology (GO) and their use in annotations make cross species compari- sons of genes possible, along with a wide range of other activities. Tools, such as AmiGO, allow exploration of genes based on their GO annotations. This human driven explora- tion and querying of GO is obviously useful, but by taking advantage of the ontological representation we can use the- se annotations to create a rich polyhierarchy of proteins for enhanced querying. This also opens up possibilities for ex- ploring GOA for redundancies and defects in annotations.To do this we have created a set of OWL classes for mouse GOA genes. Each gene is represented as a class, with the appropriate relationships to the GO aspects with which it has been annotated. We then use defined classes to query these protein classes and to build a complex hierarchy. This standard use of OWL affords a rich interaction with GO an- notations to give a fine partitioning of the proteins in the ontology.