An experimental study of information content measurement of gene ontology terms

The gene ontology (GO) is commonly used to store and organize information about functions of biological molecules through a controlled vocabulary of terms (GO Terms). GO Terms refer to biological concepts through the annotation process. There exist many different annotation processes used by researchers. Each term has a different specificity that is formally measured by the information content (IC). Both the structure of GO and the corpora of annotations are continuously changing following novel experimental findings. This work focuses on how changes of annotations affect the IC of terms. The study confirms that statistically significant differences among annotation corpus of different years on each species occur. These results convey that annotation corpora changes have a high impact on IC.