Even if you know something about biomedical ontologies, you might have wondered where the ontology "annotations"--that is, the assignments of specific ontology terms to genes, proteins, QTLs, animal strains, etc--come from.  How are terms assigned to data objects?  What are the assignments based on?  And is there a way to tell just by looking at an annotation what kind of evidence it's based on?  This video is the first of a pair of companion tutorials that answer these questions.

This video will show you:

• what an ontology annotation is
• why it's helpful to researchers that ontology terms are assigned to genes, gene products and other data objects
• how to tell the difference between an annotation that's based on experimental evidence and one that isn't
• what an "evidence code" is
• how annotations can be assigned to genes or other data objects on which no research has been done

This video is the second in a series of introductory tutorials about biomedical ontologies.  For a more detailed look at ontology annotations and the information they contain, stay tuned for the next installment:  Anatomy of an Ontology Annotation, part 2.