Bi-directional semantic similarity for gene ontology to optimize biological and clinical analyses.

Semantic similarity analysis facilitates automated semantic explanations of biological and clinical data annotated by biomedical ontologies. Gene ontology (GO) has become one of the most important biomedical ontologies with a set of controlled vocabularies, providing rich semantic annotations for genes and molecular phenotypes for diseases. Current methods for measuring GO semantic similarities are limited to considering only the ancestor terms while neglecting the descendants. One can find many GO term pairs whose ancestors are identical but whose descendants are very different and vice versa. Moreover, the lower parts of GO trees are full of terms with more specific semantics.

Pubmed ID: 22374934