<p>This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.</p> <p>Controlled vocabularies are common within bioinformatics resources. They can be used to
give a summary of the knowledge held about a particular entity. They are also used to
constrain values given for particular attributes of an entity. This helps create a shared
understanding of a domain and aids increased precision and recall during querying of
resources. Ontologies can also provide such facilities, but can also enhance their utility.
Controlled vocabularies are often simply lists of words, but may be viewed as a kind of
ontology. Ideally ontologies are structurally enriched with relationships between terms
within the vocabulary. Use of such rich forms of vocabularies in database annotation could
enhance those resources usability by both humans and computers. The representation of
the knowledge content of biological resources in a computationally accessible form opens
the prospect of greater support for a biologist investigating new data.</p>
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Comp Funct Genomics. 2002 Feb; 3(1):42-46