Programmatic Access to Gene Ontology


This page documents how to query the ontology and annotations using the GO APIs


The purpose of the Biolink Model is to provide a high level datamodel of biological entities (genes, diseases, phenotypes, pathways, individuals, substances, etc), their properties, relationships, and ways in which they can be associated. The GO API implementation and its associated swagger documentation are available at http://api.geneontology.org/.

In the Biolink Model, any GO term is referred to as “function”, hence the following query returns meta data about the GO term {id}:

/bioentity/function/{id}

Example: annotations for the apoptotic process term

http://api.geneontology.org/api/bioentity/function/GO:0006915

Note: pagination can be achieved by using the start & rows parameter. Example :

http://api.geneontology.org/api/bioentity/function/GO:0006915?start=0&rows=2