Using Treemaps to Visualize Gene Ontologies

2. Gene Ontology 2.1 Objective The objective of Gene Ontology (GO) is to provide controlled vocabularies for the description of the molecular function, biological process and cellular component of gene products. The controlled vocabularies of terms are structured to allow both attribution and querying to be at different levels of granularity. The three organizing principles of GO are molecular function, biological process and cellular component [1]. Each of these are further divided into subparts. For example cellular component is further divided into cell, external protective structure, extracellular, obsolete, unlocalized etc. Each of these nodes is further divided into sub categories.