Comment

Life sentences: Ontology recapitulates philology

Sydney Brenner

  • Correspondence: Sydney Brenner

Author Affiliations

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, 10010 North Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla, CA 92037-1099, USA

Genome Biology 2002, 3:comment1006-comment1006.2 doi:10.1186/gb-2002-3-4-comment1006

Published: 19 March 2002

Ontology is a structured vocabulary in the form of a directed acyclic graph such that each term is descended from its parent by some defined relationship such as "part of". The network we should be interested in is not the network of names but the network of the objects themselves.