Evolution of the Sequence Ontology terms and relationships

The Sequence Ontology is an established ontology, with a large user community, for the purpose of genomic annotation. We are reforming the ontology to provide better terms and relationships to describe the features of biological sequence, for both genomic and derived sequence. The SO is working within the guidelines of the OBO Foundry to provide interoperability between SO and the other related OBO ontologies. Here, we report changes and improvements made to SO including new relationships to better define the mereological, spatial and temporal aspects of biological sequence. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.