One step towards meeting this challenge is to design an ontology to represent gene function, and to implement this within a genomic database. The advantages that would flow from this are several. One major advantage is that if different 'single-organism' databases adopted the same ontology, then the community would have a powerful method for exploring the functional aspects of the genomes of several different organisms. Another major advantage is that this will provide an aide to the discovery of the function of new sequences. Genes are expressed in temporally and spatially characteristic patterns.
Gene products possess one or more biochemical, physiological or structural functions.
Genes may have more than one product and these may be functionally distinct. These are all attributes of genes which are of great interest to all biologists. We need a way to describe these attributes in a rigorous way that will enable biologists to annotate genomes and to explore the universe of genomes. That would promote interconnections between databases based upon attributes richer than sequence or structure. There are several attributes of genes that need to be represented systematically.