GOSemSim: An R package for measuring semantic similarity among GO terms and gene products

Abstract

Summary: The semantic comparisons of Gene Ontology (GO) annotations provide quantitative ways to compute similarities between genes and gene groups, and have became important basis for many bioinformatics analysis approaches. GOSemSim is an R package for semantic similarity computation among GO terms, sets of GO terms, gene products and gene clusters. Four information content (IC)- and a graph-based methods are implemented in the GOSemSim package, multiple species including human, rat, mouse, fly and yeast are also supported. The functions provided by the GOSemSim offer flexibility for applications, and can be easily integrated into high-throughput analysis pipelines. Availability: GOSemSim is released under the GNU General Public License within Bioconductor project, and freely available at http://bioconductor.org/packages/2.6/bioc/html/GOSemSim.html. Contact: boxc@bmi.ac.cn; sqwang@bmi.ac.cn. Supplementary information: Supplementary information is available at Bioinformatics online. © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.