The Gene Ontology project provides a controlled vocabulary to describe gene and gene product attributes in any organism.

Prefix

go

Preferred Prefix

GO

Alternative Prefixes

goccid gobp gobpid gomfid gomf gocc

Keywords

annotation biocuration biological_process cellular_component dataplant expression data function gene gene functional annotation genome/gene go-term enrichment data knowledge representation life science life sciences, biology medicine molecular_function obo omics ontologies ontology ontology/terminology/nomenclature protein rna sequence annotation transcript

Version

2026-07-26

License

CC-BY-4.0

Links

Homepage Repository OBO OWL OBO JSON @go@genomic.social

Publications

2026 The Gene Ontology knowledgebase in 2026

https://bioregistry.io/pubmed:36866529

2021 The Gene Ontology resource: enriching a GOld mine

2019 The Gene Ontology Resource: 20 years and still GOing strong

2014 Gene Ontology Consortium: going forward

2013 Dovetailing biology and chemistry: integrating the Gene Ontology with the ChEBI chemical ontology

2012 Gene Ontology annotations and resources

2011 The Gene Ontology: enhancements for 2011

2009 The Gene Ontology in 2010: extensions and refinements

https://bioregistry.io/pubmed:19578431

2004 The Gene Ontology (GO) database and informatics resource

2000 Gene ontology: tool for the unification of biology. The Gene Ontology Consortium

Pattern for Local Unique Identifiers

Local unique identifiers in Gene Ontology should match this regular expression:
^\d{7}$

Example Local Unique Identifier

0032571   Resolve

Pattern for CURIES

Compact URIs (CURIEs) constructed from Gene Ontology should match this regular expression:
^GO:\d{7}$

Example CURIE

GO:0032571

Format String for RDF URIs

http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/GO_$1

Example RDF URI

http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/GO_0032571

MIRIAM Namespace Embedded in LUI

The legacy MIRIAM standard for generating CURIEs with this resource annotates the namespaceEmbeddedInLUI as true. This means that you may see local unique identifiers that include a redundant prefix and delimiter (also known as a banana) and therefore look like a CURIE. For , the banana looks like GO:. Therefore, you may see local unique identifiers for this resource that look like GO:0032571 (instead of the canonical form 0032571) and CURIEs for this resource that look like GO:GO:0032571 (instead of the canonical form GO:0032571). The Semantic Farm will automatically strip off the banana when standardizing local unique identifiers and CURIEs.

Contact

Suzi Aleksander   0000-0001-6787-2901   suzialeksander

Contributor

contributor James Alastair McLaughlin   0000-0002-8361-2795   jamesamcl

A summary of the relations in the Semantic Farm schema can be found here.

Depends On (4)

CL NCBITaxon RO UBERON

Appears In (13)

AGRO CHIRO CL ECOCORE ECTO ENVO MAXO PCL PCO PLANP UBERON XPO ZP

In Collection (5)

Global Biodata Coalition - Global Core Biodata Resources Synapse.org external links DataPLANT Collection NFDI4BIOIMAGE Collection NFDI4Health Collection

Mappings from records in Semantic Farm to external registries comprises the metaregistry. This resource has 24 mappings to external registries with 11 unique external prefixes.

A provider turns a local unique identifiers from a resource into a URI. Many providers are also resolvable as URLs (i.e., they can be used in a web browser).

The local unique identifier 0032571 is used to demonstrate the providers available for Gene Ontology. Some providers may use a different example, which is displayed in the table below. A guide for curating additional providers can be found here.

Additional providers curated in the Semantic Farm are listed here. These are typically inherited from Identifiers.org or Prefix Commons, and need extra curation.