How to submit requests for ontology and annotations

GO uses GitHub as a mechanism for tracking ontology and annotation issues.

• The GO-ontology tracker captures suggestions for changes to the ontology, inclusing suggestions for new terms, changes to definitions or term position in the hierarchy, to addition of new subsets.
• The GO-annotation tracker is used to report incorrect annotations or to make suggestions for new annotations.

Creating a GitHub account

• On the GitHub website, press the ‘Sign up for GitHub’ button at the top-right corner and follow the instructions. Once registered, sign in using the button in the upper right-hand corner.
• By signing up for a GitHub account, you can track your submissions online and via email. This tracker is visible to anyone, but only people with GitHub accounts can add issues and comments.
• Note that the volume of messages on these repositories is significant; we recommend that you set your notifications to ‘Not watching’ using the button with the ‘eye’ icon, found at the upper right corner of the page, so that you only get notified of tickets you have created or in which you have been mentioned. If you choose to ‘Watch’ a repository, an email will be sent every time comments are added to the issue, or when its status changes.

Submitting a new ticket to GO via GitHub

• Visit the appropriate GO ontology requests tracker.
• Click on the green ‘New Issue’ button.
• Enter the subject of your request in the ‘Title’ field, which will be your queue to find the issue from the list of requests.
• Enter details of your request in the ‘Leave a Comment’ box.
• Press the ‘Submit new issue’ button at the bottom of the box. More details about contributing to the ontology are available in the GitHub Guidelines for Contributing Ontology tickets.

Keeping track of your requests

To find your request again in the GOC tracker, while on the page listing all submitted issues, use the ‘Filters’ box and drop-down menu to restrict the types of request you may display.