This document is an historical preservation and was created as a direct port (only adjusting spaces, fonts, and pagination) of a copy of a document found at http://biomirror.aarnet.edu.au/biomirror/geneontology/docs/gene_ontology_discussion.html on 2021-09-08. This upstream mirrored document itself was created by an automated process copying the GO website (http://geneontology.org) in October 2003.

One of the major challenges facing genomic research today is that of integrating sequence data with the vast, and growing, body of data from functional analyses of genes. One step towards meeting this challenge is to design an ontology to represent gene function, and to implement this within a genomic database.