Information science for biology

Dictionary : do I even know the meaning of the word?

In a recent discussion about what my research is about, I found myself stating clearly and for the first time that I believed the Gene Ontology is essentially a glorified dictionary.

If one can put aside the pretensions garnered by that big word ‘ontology’, the GO project is a list of defined terms describing one part of the biological domain. The three separate ontologies, the relationships, the structure formed by the terms has occluded for me the simple fact that in a basic sense, the Gene Ontology is a dictionary of biological words.

Complexities of ontologies aside, if the GO project had originally been conceived as a universal dictionary for the biological domain, this in itself would have been a tremendously ambitious project which may, perhaps, have revealed just how difficult it is to obtain towards any sort of grand consensus between the competing perspectives and understandings of the numerous micro-domains in biology.

As it stands though, the Gene Ontology is a vastly more complicated endeavour which leap-frogged the difficult question of whether there did indeed exist any sort of universally dictionary of terms for the biological domain. Instead, GO muscled straight into the thorny world of classes, instances, parts and all manner of other complicated relations.

When I was explaining myself earlier, I was asked if biologists did not already have a universal dictionary, a simple, shared understanding of the words they use and what these words mean.

A quick search on Amazon revealed over a thousand hits for the search term ‘biology dictionary’.

I think the domain of biology would best be described as a confederation of states, each speaking in slightly different accents and idioms.