Background
==========

The Gene Ontology (GO) project started to provide semantic standards for the annotation of molecular attributes of genes and gene products \[[@B1]\].  The Gene Ontology is a controlled vocabulary for describing genes and gene products in terms of their associated biological processes, cellular components and molecular functions.  The structural foundation of GO is formally a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) wherein the terms are equivalent to the nodes and the relationships to the edges of the graph \[[@B2]\]. 

GO has grown enormously.  The number of organism groups participating in the GO Consortium has grown every quarter year from the initial three to roughly two dozen \[[@B3]\].  A lot of biological databases use GO to annotate the molecular attributes of genes and gene products \[[@B4],[@B5]\].  GO-based analysis of microarray and mass spectrometry data have been successfully realized \[[@B3]\].  Recently, new generation of tools based-on GO have been developed, aiming to enhance biological knowledge such as protein structure classifying \[[@B6]\], gene-phenotype association predicting \[[@B7]\] and gene network building \[[@B8]\].  More details are available at GO website (<http://www.geneontology.org/GO.tools.shtml>).  Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) metathesaurus has been integrated with GO to expand UMLS into the biological domain \[[@B9]\]. 

In spite of the undoubted importance of GO, several drawbacks associated with GO and GO-based annotations have been introduced.  Masseroli correctly pointed out the structural and semantic problems of GO such as metonymy, species-specific terms and multiple paths \[[@B10]\].  Dolan et al.  evaluated the reliability of GO-based annotations \[[@B11]\].  Poor inter-annotator reliability of GO-based annotations for human-mouse orthologous gene pairs was reported between two gene-annotation groups, MGI and GOA.  Park et al.  identified syntactic errors caused by the two GO-update operations, 'new obsoletions' and 'new term merges', used in the course of GO version change \[[@B12]\].  They introduced GOChase to detect and correct the syntactic errors and error propagations in GO-based annotations (<http://www.snubi.org/software/GOChase/>). 

In the present study, we further identified semantic error types in GO-based annotations; redundant, biological-domain-inconsistent and taxonomy inconsistent annotation. 

The first type is "redundant annotation."  When a gene is annotated to a GO term, for instance, according to the current GO annotation paradigm, it is considered to be implicitly annotated to all parents of the term.  Assigning both parent and child terms to the same gene is regarded as "redundant annotation."  In some cases, if parent and child term was annotated in specific gene product using different evidence code, these annotations hard to say completely redundant.  For example, an experiment may provide enough evidence to annotate to a parent, but not to any specific child, whereas a more specific annotation may be predicted by sequence comparison or other computation.  In such cases both annotation would be retained, the parent because of its experiment support and the child for specificity.  So we analyze the redundant annotation to distinguish the evidence code used in parent and child term. 

The second type is "biological domain-inconsistent annotation."  A GO term should avoid using species-specific definitions and rather include any term that can be applied to more than one taxonomy classes of organisms (The Gene Ontology Consortium, 2000).  Some GO terms have species-specific characteristics such as *nucleus* (GO:0005634), specific for eukaryotes and *unidirectional conjugation* (GO:0009291), specific for prokaryotic specific terms.  As GO-based annotation expands to various species, however, species-specific terms become increasingly problematic.  For example, a gene product having UNIPROT ID O24899 from Helicobacter pylori, a kind of bacteria, is wrongly annotated to *nucleus*, a eukaryote-only GO term. 

The third type is "taxonomy inconsistent annotation".  Recently, the GO Consortium provided terms with taxonomy restrictions, containing species-specific terms with the NCBI taxonomy group for which they are or are not appropriate (<http://www.geneontology.org/GO.sensu.shtml>).  Forty four taxonomic groups used taxonomy restricted terms in the January 2010 GO version.  Taxonomy inconsistent annotation occurs when a taxonomy restricted term is annotated to a gene that does not belong to the corresponding taxonomy group.  GO consortium checks the inconsistent annotation using taxonomy restricted terms and provide reports of inconsistent annotation.  But many annotations have been produced without consideration of taxonomy restricted terms.  For example, we found that a eukaryote restricted GO term, Golgi apparatus (GO:0005794), was (wrongly) annotated to 27 gene products of *Escherichia coli*, a kind of bacteria. 

In the present study, we analyzed the distributions of the semantic inconsistencies in GO-based annotations using 27 major biological databases.  To understand the factors influencing such inconsistent annotations, we perform correlation analysis between the inconsistent annotations and the possible attributes for the inconsistent annotations including the usage of evidence codes ([http://www.geneontology.org/GO.evidence.  shtml](http://www.geneontology.org/GO.evidence.shtml)), the number of gene products, the number of species and the number of GO terms.  We developed a set of web-based utilities, GOChase-II, to correct the semantic inconsistencies in addition to the previous corrections for the syntactic errors by GOChase-I \[[@B12]\]. 

Material and methods
====================

Databases
---------

We obtained GO DB downloads from the GO database site (<http://www.geneontology.org/GO.downloads.database.shtml>).  We collected GO-based annotations for genes and gene products from 27 major biological databases including NCBI's Gene and Ensembl.  The GO DB schema used for data integration was obtained at <http://www.geneontology.org/images/diag-godb-er.jpg>.  To extract GO-update history, we downloaded GO monthly reports from January 2000 to December 2007 from the GO FTP site (<ftp://ftp.geneontolgy.org>).  Since January 2008, GO consortium, however, have not provided monthly reports, thus we use OBO-Edit tool to generate GO change reports over the past month \[[@B15]\].  OBO-Edit generated reports provide four additional types of change; change comment, change synonym, change category, and change external reference.  It also provide six types of changes which defined by monthly report; new term, new obsoletion, term name change, new definition, new term merge and term movement.  We parsed these 11 types of change for resolving GO-update history.  The NCBI taxonomy database (<ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/pub/taxonomy/>) was downloaded to find and correct biological domain -inconsistent annotations.  The NCBI taxonomy database indexes over 320,000 named organisms that are represented in the databases with at least one nucleotide or protein sequence \[[@B16]\]. 

Semantic inconsistencies
------------------------

The hierarchical relationships extracted from the GO DAGs were used to determine redundant annotations.  For each gene product, parent-child relationship between any pair of GO terms annotated to the gene product in the 27 biological databases was tested to determine redundant annotations (Table [1](#T1){ref-type="table"}).  We analyze the redundant annotation to distinguish between one specific gene product annotated using parent-child terms that use the same evidence code and those use different evidence codes.  In some cases (details in introduction section), the redundant annotations of parent-child terms use the different evidence code are supporting data. 

###### 

Redundant annotations in biological databases

  Databases              **DB version** mm/dd/yy   **GO version**mm/dd/yy   No.  of gene products annotated with GO terms   No.  of GO annotations applied to gene products   No.  of GO terms used in gene product annotations                                                                                                                                                              
  ---------------------- ------------------------- ------------------------ ---------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------ -------------------------------------------------- --------------------- ------------------------------------------- ---------------------- --------------------- ------------------------------------------- ----------------
                                                                            Redundant anntation                            Redundant annotation (same evidence code)        Total gene products                                Redundant anntation   Redundant annotation (same evidence code)   Total GO annotations   Redundant anntation   Redundant annotation (same evidence code)   Total GO terms
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
  Ensembl^a^             09/01/09                  01/01/10                 307,467                                        299,911                                          673,180                                            783,687               707,335                                     4,395,125              2,978                 2,551                                       12,309
  Gene^b^                12/15/09                  01/01/10                 88,797                                         73,001                                           235,852                                            223,772               143,537                                     1,234,220              3,369                 2,632                                       15,363
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
  AspGD^c^               12/21/09                  01/01/10                 523                                            225                                              3,425                                              640                   259                                         15,340                 239                   107                                         3,259
  CGD                    11/24/09                  01/01/10                 474                                            229                                              4,040                                              772                   309                                         20,009                 254                   104                                         3,332
  dictyBase              12/27/09                  01/01/10                 2,590                                          1,619                                            7,489                                              4,651                 2,377                                       31,064                 368                   241                                         2,403
  EcoCyc                 12/14/09                  01/01/10                 173                                            155                                              1,869                                              273                   219                                         4,992                  132                   111                                         1,388
  FB                     10/30/09                  01/01/10                 3,355                                          1,823                                            12,509                                             7,301                 2,740                                       68,316                 1,077                 656                                         4,924
  GeneDB_Pfalciparum     10/27/05                  01/01/10                 21                                             16                                               2,206                                              21                    16                                          4,632                  17                    15                                          663
  GeneDB_Spombe          09/28/09                  01/01/10                 2,797                                          1,330                                            5,213                                              4,009                 1,662                                       34,114                 495                   297                                         3,394
  GeneDB_Tbrucei         07/18/07                  01/01/10                 234                                            191                                              2,977                                              251                   202                                         10,414                 61                    52                                          935
  GR_protein             08/26/09                  01/01/10                 426                                            369                                              41,321                                             552                   445                                         49,721                 90                    77                                          646
  JCVI_CMR               07/22/09                  01/01/10                 446                                            412                                              21,271                                             455                   417                                         54,398                 90                    83                                          2,350
  MGI                    12/17/09                  01/01/10                 14,927                                         13,466                                           18,167                                             50,970                33,966                                      151,652                1,564                 1,214                                       7,327
  NCBI                   03/03/08                  01/01/10                 324                                            187                                              11,274                                             457                   319                                         27,647                 66                    63                                          492
  PDB                    12/17/09                  01/01/10                 10,234                                         10,234                                           21,849                                             18,263                18,263                                      83,588                 283                   283                                         1,884
  PseudoCAP              06/28/06                  01/01/10                 584                                            244                                              1,519                                              720                   275                                         7,284                  54                    30                                          859
  RefSeq                 12/14/09                  01/01/10                 1,945                                          1,945                                            12,166                                             2,748                 2,748                                       36,201                 125                   125                                         1,440
  RGD                    10/02/09                  01/01/10                 9,932                                          8,008                                            17,352                                             29,961                15,120                                      180,606                1,893                 1,341                                       9,094
  SGD                    12/25/09                  01/01/10                 5,273                                          4,482                                            6,353                                              23,815                11,575                                      76,188                 1,118                 766                                         4,222
  SGN                    10/23/09                  01/01/10                 12                                             9                                                155                                                12                    9                                           1,253                  10                    8                                           653
  TAIR                   12/23/09                  01/01/10                 8,102                                          6,871                                            51,713                                             10,615                8,656                                       149,466                646                   473                                         4,103
  TIGR_CMR               11/14/07                  01/01/10                 757                                            731                                              40,653                                             782                   756                                         101,965                95                    92                                          2,441
  UniProt                12/17/09                  01/01/10                 206                                            41                                               1,290                                              381                   67                                          9,381                  11                    9                                           173
  UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot   12/17/09                  01/01/10                 384,061                                        380,296                                          419,241                                            1,303,909             1,279,924                                   3,416,194              1,709                 1,514                                       11,507
  UniProtKB/TrEMBL       12/17/09                  01/01/10                 3,615,614                                      3,615,469                                        5,981,451                                          9,116,513             9,115,708                                   28,760,356             1,420                 1,402                                       9,262
  WB                     11/26/09                  01/01/10                 5,252                                          5,041                                            15,667                                             9,904                 8,926                                       91,611                 497                   381                                         2,738
  ZFIN                   12/23/09                  01/01/10                 7,047                                          6,856                                            15,074                                             17,683                16,454                                      101,152                603                   509                                         3,019

a <http://www.ensembl.org/index.html>

b <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene>

c <http://www.geneontology.org/GO.downloads.annotations.shtml>

To find biological domain inconsistency in GO annotation, we reviewed and manually extracted 410 'eukaryote-only' and 73 'prokaryote-only' GO terms including such terms as *RNA import into nucleus* and *ketodeoxyoctanoate biosynthesis* (see additional file [1](#S1){ref-type="supplementary-material"} and [2](#S2){ref-type="supplementary-material"}).  All gene products in the 27 databases were divided into non-prokaryotic and non-eukaryotic classes according to the species definition in NCBI taxonomy.  Biological-domain-inconsistent annotation was determined by testing the consistency between the corresponding species of a gene product and the 'prokaryote-only' or 'eukaryote-only' classification of the annotation term. 

There were 44 taxonomy groups having taxonomy restricted terms in the January 2010 GO version.  The taxonomy inconsistent annotation was determined by inconsistency between species-specific GO terms and the species of origin of the annotated gene products. 

Attributes for inconsistent annotation
--------------------------------------

In search for the possible attributes for the inconsistent annotations, we evaluated five possible attributes by correlation analysis; the use of different evidence codes, the number of gene products, the number of species, the number of GO terms, and the average number of GO annotations.  Every GO annotation is supposed to indicate the type of evidence.  There are 18 evidence codes currently available.  When no evidence code was assigned for an annotation, we marked it as 'Not Available (NA)'. 

Results
=======

To analyze the distributions of the semantic inconsistencies in GO-based annotations we calculated the distribution of redundant annotations in the 27 biological databases (Table [1](#T1){ref-type="table"}).  All databases have redundant annotation.  The fraction of redundant annotations in databases is distributed from 0.9% to 91% for gene products (31% in average), from 2% to 26% for GO terms (13% in average), and from 0.4% to 38% for GO annotations (12% in average).  UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot shows the highest redundancy for gene product (91%) and GO annotation (38%).  The database showing the highest redundancy in GO terms is Ensembl (24%).  GeneDB_Pfalciparum shows the lowest numbers among the databases; 0.9% for gene products, 2.5% for GO terms and 0.4% for GO annotations.  In all databases, the fractions of redundant annotation based on the same evidence code are larger than different evidence code. 

The distributions of biological-domain-inconsistent annotations are calculated using prokaryote-only and eukaryote-only GO terms we defined.  Biological domain inconsistent annotation was found in thirteen databases of non-prokaryotic gene product and eight databases of non-eukaryotic gene product (Table [2](#T2){ref-type="table"}).  Most of databases have less than 100 inconsistent annotations, except four databases (Ensembl, NCBI Gene, UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot and UniProtKB/TrEMBL).  In both biological domains, UniProtKB/TrEMBL is shown to have the highest portion of inconsistent annotation by all three measures.  Taxonomy inconsistent annotations were found in 27 out of the 44 taxonomy groups having at least one taxonomy restricted GO term (Table 3 in additional file [3](#S3){ref-type="supplementary-material"}, see method).  Table 3 in Additional file [3](#S3){ref-type="supplementary-material"} shows the numbers of taxonomy inconsistent annotations (as numerators) and the numbers of taxonomy restricted GO terms used (as denominators) in the 27 databases.  A blank cell means no annotation with taxonomy restricted GO term.  Taxonomy inconsistent annotations are not evenly distributed across databases or taxonomy groups (Table 3 in additional file [3](#S3){ref-type="supplementary-material"}).  The NCBI Gene, Ensemble, UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot and UniProtKB/TrEMBL, for example, has inconsistent annotation in most of taxonomy groups as while, no taxonomy inconsistent annotation was found in the five databases: CGD (0/2174), GeneDB_Tbrucei (0/422), NCBI (0/1291), PseudoCAP(0/20), and UniProt (0/17).  Interestingly, all annotations for *Passeriformes* (11/11) are taxonomy inconsistent. * Cellular organisms* show the lowest taxonomy-inconsistent annotations rate (7/42344) among the 27 taxonomy groups. 

###### 

Biological-domain-inconsistent annotations in biological databases

  Biological Domain              Databases              **DB version** mm/dd/yy   **GO version** mm/dd/yy   No.  of gene products annotated with GO terms   No.  of GO annotations applied to gene products   No.  of GO terms used in gene product annotations                                                          
  ------------------------------ ---------------------- ------------------------- ------------------------- ---------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------ -------------------------------------------------- --------------------- -------------------------------- ----------------
                                                                                                            Biological-domain inconsistent                 Total gene product                               Biological-domain inconsistent                     Total GO annotation   Biological-domain inconsistent   Total GO terms
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
  Non-prokaryotic gene product   Ensembl^a^             09/01/09                  01/01/10                  711                                            1,891,586                                        760                                                4,395,125             13                               12,309
                                 Gene^b^                12/15/09                  01/01/10                  1,517                                          2,391,443                                        1,647                                              1,133,060             34                               14,762
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
                                 AspGD^c^               12/21/09                  01/01/10                  2                                              3,425                                            2                                                  15,340                1                                3,259
                                 dictyBase              12/27/09                  01/01/10                  1                                              7,489                                            1                                                  31,064                1                                2,403
                                 FB                     10/30/09                  01/01/10                  1                                              12,509                                           1                                                  68,316                1                                4,924
                                 GeneDB_Tbrucei         07/18/07                  01/01/10                  2                                              2,977                                            2                                                  10,414                1                                935
                                 MGI                    12/17/09                  01/01/10                  2                                              18,167                                           2                                                  151,652               2                                7,327
                                 PDB                    12/17/09                  01/01/10                  26                                             9,170                                            26                                                 31,686                3                                1,024
                                 RGD                    10/02/09                  01/01/10                  2                                              18,363                                           4                                                  180,606               3                                9,094
                                 TAIR                   12/23/09                  01/01/10                  3                                              51,713                                           3                                                  149,466               1                                4,103
                                 UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot   12/17/09                  01/01/10                  2,680                                          122,261                                          3,803                                              1,035,209             17                               10,589
                                 UniProtKB/TrEMBL       12/17/09                  01/01/10                  20,573                                         2,333,592                                        23,876                                             12,234,060            24                               8,586
                                 WB                     11/26/09                  01/01/10                  12                                             15,667                                           13                                                 91,611                5                                2,738
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
  Non-eukaryotic gene product    Geneb^b^               12/15/09                  01/01/10                  53,088                                         3,595,041                                        76,597                                             101,160               319                              2,497
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
                                 EcoCyc^c^              12/14/09                  01/01/10                  2                                              1,869                                            2                                                  4,992                 1                                1,388
                                 JCVI_CMR               07/22/09                  01/01/10                  16                                             21,271                                           16                                                 54,398                3                                2,350
                                 PDB                    12/17/09                  01/01/10                  83                                             16,580                                           85                                                 66,027                12                               1,689
                                 TIGR_CMR               11/14/07                  01/01/10                  70                                             40,653                                           70                                                 101,965               4                                2,441
                                 UniProt                12/17/09                  01/01/10                  48                                             248                                              67                                                 7,870                 3                                44
                                 UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot   12/17/09                  01/01/10                  4,454                                          324,523                                          5,297                                              2,581,774             30                               3,306
                                 UniProtKB/TrEMBL       12/17/09                  01/01/10                  77,047                                         4,459,834                                        83,965                                             20,009,318            49                               4,048

a <http://www.ensembl.org/index.html>

b <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene>

c <http://www.geneontology.org/GO.current.annotations.shtml>

To investigate which factors are related to each inconsistent annotation we analyzed correlation between three types of inconsistent annotation and 23 possible attributes of inconsistent annotation (Table [3](#T3){ref-type="table"}).  As shown in table [3](#T3){ref-type="table"}, Inferred from Electronic Annotation (IEA) shows the highest correlation with redundant (r=0.99) and taxonomy inconsistent annotation (r=0.99).  Biological domain inconsistent annotation shows high correlation with number of gene product (0.97).  We found that the numbers of species and average number of GO annotation show high correlation while the number of GO term shows low correlation with all types of inconsistent annotation (Table [3](#T3){ref-type="table"}). 

###### 

Gene Ontology distribution incorrectly annotated across evidence codes and the related factors

  Evidence code                No.  of inaccurate annotation (correlation coefficient value)   Total No.  of GO annotation                                       
  ---------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- --------------- ------------------- ------------
  NR                           0 (\*)                                                         0 (\*)                       0 (\*)          0 (\*)              6
  ISM                          30 (-0.07)                                                     2 (0.26)                     0 (\*)          32 (-0.06)          279
  ISA                          287 (-0.05)                                                    1,385 (0.40)                 0 (\*)          1,672 (-0.04)       11,756
  IGC                          322 (-0.05)                                                    11 (0.43)                    0 (\*)          333 (-0.04)         888
  IC                           1,193 (-0.03)                                                  1,265 (0.40)                 0 (\*)          2,458 (-0.02)       12,490
  IEP                          2,344 (-0.03)                                                  2,467 (0.46)                 0 (\*)          4,811 (-0.02)       27,889
  EXP                          3,273 (0.08)                                                   1,221 (0.16)                 0 (\*)          4,494 (0.08)        20,781
  IGI                          3,628 (-0.02)                                                  4,171 (0.41)                 0 (\*)          7,799 (-0.02)       34,985
  RCA                          6,469 (-0.07)                                                  7,710 (0.18)                 0 (\*)          14,179 (-0.06)      85,014
  NAS                          7,921 (0.01)                                                   4,285 (0.39)                 0 (\*)          12,206 (0.02)       58,687
  IPI                          10,555 (0.11)                                                  1,163 (0.31)                 0 (\*)          11,718 (0.11)       72,597
  ISO                          14,119 (-0.05)                                                 15,956 (0.39)                16 (-0.06)      30,091 (-0.04)      115,268
  TAS                          15,944 (0.01)                                                  8,331 (0.39)                 5 (-0.01)       24,280 (0.01)       113,414
  ND                           18,987 (-0.07)                                                 1 (0.51)                     0 (\*)          18,988 (-0.05)      366,152
  ISS                          24,314 (0.01)                                                  12,828 (0.53)                49 (0.01)       37,191 (0.03)       377,770
  IMP                          25,994 (-0.03)                                                 29,932 (0.38)                160 (-0.06)     56,086 (-0.03)      242,825
  IDA                          44,327 (0.01)                                                  29,863 (0.38)                17 (-0.02)      74,207 (0.01)       311,481
  IEA                          11,433,355 (0.99)                                              219,560 (0.75)               56,180 (0.99)   11,709,095 (0.99)   42,984,075
  NA (Not Avaliable)           803 (-0.02)                                                    3,654 (0.61)                 12 (-0.04)      4,469 (-0.01)       18,102
                                                                                                                                                               
  No of gene product           (0.71)                                                         (0.97)                       (0.69)          (0.72)              
  No.  of species               (0.99)                                                         (0.78)                       (0.99)          (0.99)              
  No.  of GO term               (0.35)                                                         (0.57)                       (0.34)          (0.36)              
  Average No.  of annotations   (0.99)                                                         (0.76)                       (0.99)          (0.99)              

GOChase-II implementation
-------------------------

GOChase-I \[[@B12]\] is a set of web-based utilities to detect and correct *syntactic* errors from GO-based annotations caused by GO versioning and tracing problems.  On the contrary, GOChase-II (<http://www.snubi.org/software/GOChase2/>) attempts to correct *semantic* errors in GO-based annotations.  It provides four web-based interfaces. ( 1) GOChase-History resolves the whole evolution history of a GO ID.  As an example, the GO term, *sorocarp development* (GO:0030587), has repeatedly swung back and forth among the fifteen GO terms (*reproduction*, *cell communication*, *development*, *response to external stimulus*, *physiological process*, *biological_process*, *response to biotic stimulus*, *morphogenesis*, *multicellular organismal development*, *anatomical structure morphogenesis*, *anatomical structure development*, *asexual reproduction*, *fruiting body development in response to starvation*, *fruiting body development*, *response to starvation*) by the 31 GO operations in fifteen updates between March 2002 and November 2008. ( 2) GOChase-Species resolves the distribution of the usage of a GO term across different species and displays the distribution onto the taxonomy tree.  The Species function is a powerful tool to analyze the species specificity of a GO term.  Some terms are limited to specific species whereas others are used for a wide variety of species.  For example, *negative regulation of vulval development* (GO:0040027) is annotated 395 times but exclusively to *Caenorhabditis elegans* (i.e. 100%).  It is suggested that *cyanelle* may be a species-specific term.  We identified 3548 GO terms annotated only to a single species in January 2010 GO version (see additional file [4](#S4){ref-type="supplementary-material"}).  On the other hand, *oxidoreductase activity* (GO:0016491) is annotated 800,048 times to 108,929 different species (i.e. 7.3 times per a species in average).  Species function can also be used to find the wrong use of species-specific terms. ( 3) GOChase-Correct highlights a \'merged-term\' and redirects it to the correct \'target term\' into which the terms have been merged.  For an obsolete term, GOChase provides the alternative terms.  GOChase-Correct correct redundant and biological-domain-inconsistent annotations. ( 4) When one inputs a GO ID, GOChase will resolve all gene products annotated with the GO ID across all the databases in Table [1](#T1){ref-type="table"}.  GOChaser provides GO enrichment analysis for input gene-expression clusters.  Although most GO enrichment analysis tools have the similar functionality \[[@B14]\], GOChaser has a unique functionality of correcting both the syntactic and semantic errors to improve the analysis results.  GOChaser provides two statistical models, the hypergeomeric test and the Fisher's exact test, with multiple hypotheses testing correction (Bonferroni correction). 

Conclusion and discussion
=========================

We identified and corrected three types of semantic inconsistencies in GO-based annotations for gene products from 27 major biological databases.  GO becomes a widely accepted ontology in biomedical field.  The under-managed errors and inconsistencies may reflect its short history, its ever growing complexity, and the vast amount of the biological domain knowledge.  Recently GO Consortium starts working on refining GO contents and structure \[[@B17]\].  The present study demonstrates that the GO community may be empowered by bioinformatics tools ensuring error-proof mechanisms concerning the GO hierarchical relationships, species-specific definitions and GO term usage guidelines. 

To sum up our result in this research, there is no database free from the semantic inconsistent annotation.  Among the three types of semantic inconsistent annotation, redundant annotation is most common error.  About 12% of the whole annotations are redundant.  Only a few biological-domain inconsistent annotations are found in the 18 biological databases because of the small number of 'eukaryote-only' (410) and 'prokaryote-only' (71) GO term. 

The high correlation between IEA and inconsistent annotations (Table [3](#T3){ref-type="table"}) suggests that IEA has lower reliability than others.  Electronically generated associations without human judgment are labelled as IEA.  GO Consortium proposes a hierarchy of reliability among evidence codes (<http://www.geneontology.org/GO.evidence.shtml>).  In general, TAS and IDA show higher reliability.  TAS and IDA have low correlation with all three types of inconsistent annotation.  And most of evidence codes, which curated by human, have low correlation with all types of inconsistent annotation.  This result implies that the hierarchy of reliability among evidence codes are preserved in inaccurate annotation. 

The numbers of gene products and species of a database show high correlations with all types of inconsistent annotations except taxonomy-inconsistent annotation.  It suggests that the complexity of database maintenance may affect the occurrence of inconsistent annotations.  Therefore, it is more strongly required for such databases to implement a sound mechanism such as GOChase-II in order to avoid semantic inconsistencies caused by multiple user-groups. 

Authors\' contributions
=======================

YRP conceived the study, wrote the manuscript and implemented the web-based program.  JK wrote the manuscript and validated the inconsistent annotation.  HWL validated the taxonomy-specific GO terms and helped to draft the manuscript.  YJY calculated history data of GO term.  JHK coordinated and supervised the study.  All authors read and approved the final manuscript. 

Supplementary Material
======================

###### Additional file 1

Additional file 1

###### 

Click here for file

###### Additional file 2

Additional file 2

###### 

Click here for file

###### Additional file 3

Additional file 3

###### 

Click here for file

###### Additional file 4

Additional file 4

###### 

Click here for file

Competing interests
===================

The authors declare that they have no competing interests. 

Acknowledgements
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This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (2010-0028631).  Y.R.P was supported in part by a grant of the Korea Healthcare technology R&D Project, Ministry of Health & Welfare, Republic of Korea (A070001). 

This article has been published as part of *BMC Bioinformatics* Volume 12 Supplement 1, 2011: Selected articles from the Ninth Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC 2011).  The full contents of the supplement are available online at <http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/12?issue=S1>.