The development of the Functional Genomics Investigation Ontology (FuGO) is a collaborative,
international effort that will provide a resource for annotating functional genomics
investigations, including the study design, protocols and instrumentation used, the data generated
and the types of analysis performed on the data. FuGO will contain both terms that
are universal to all functional genomics investigations and those that are domain specific. In
this way, the ontology will serve as the "semantic glue" to provide a common understanding
of data from across these disparate data sources. In addition, FuGO will reference out
to existing mature ontologies to avoid the need to duplicate these resources, and will do so in such a way as to enable their ease of use in annotation. This project is in the early stages
of development; the paper will describe efforts to initiate the project, the scope and organization
of the project, the work accomplished to date, and the challenges encountered, as well
as future plans.
This paper is part of the special issue of OMICS on data standards.
