Onto-CC is a web tool designed to automatically extract conceptual clusters from a group of accession numbers. Conceptual clusters are calculate based on the EMO-CC (Evolutionary Multi-Objective Conceptual Clustering) methodology [2] and are defined as accession numbers which share the same Gene Ontology (GO) terms. These terms might come from any of the three gene ontologies (i.e., Biological Process, Molecular Function and Cellular Component [1]), and they can belong to multiple levels in the GO hierarchy. Unlike state-of-the-art GO clustering algorithms, EMO-CC uses an evolutionary approach that takes advantage of multi-objective and multi-modal techniques allowing the extraction of concepts using GO terms from different sub-ontologies and in different levels in the hierarchy simultaneously. Thus, EMO-CC does not only provides obvious relationships for a set of accession numbers, but also is able to bring new insights finding non-obvious alternative descriptions and functional and/or spatial relationships.
References:
[1] GO Consortium, "Gene ontology: tool for the unification of biology", Nature Genet., vol. 25, pp. 25-29, 2000. [2] R. Romero-Zaliz, C. Rubio-Escudero, F. Herrera, O. Cordon, I. Zwir. A multi-objective evolutionary conceptual clustering methodology for gene annotation within structural databases: A case of study on the Gene Ontology database.
