Sequence Ontology Annotation Guide

This Sequence Ontology (SO) [13] aims to unify the way in which we describe sequence annotations, by providing a controlled vocabulary of terms and the relationships between them. Using SO terms to label the parts of sequence annotations greatly facilitates downstream analyses of their contents, as it ensures that annotations produced by different groups conform to a single standard. This greatly facilitates analyses of annotation contents and characteristics, e.g. comparisons of UTRs, alternative splicing, etc. Because SO also specifies the relationships between features, e.g. part_of, kind_of, annotations described with SO terms are also better substrates for validation and visualization software