Maintaining the ontology involves many decisions to carefully choose terms and relationships. These decisions are currently made at GO meetings and via online discussion using the GO mailing lists and the Sourceforge curator request tracker. However, it is difficult for someone starting to use GO to understand these decisions. Some insight can be obtained by mining the tracker, the listservs and the minutes of GO meetings, but this is difficult, as these discussions are often dispersed and sometimes don't contain the GO accessions in the relevant messages.

Wikis provide a way to create collaboratively written documentation for each GO term to explain how it should be used, how to satisfy the true path requirement, and whether an annotation should be placed at a different level. In addition, the wiki pages provide a discussion space, where users can post questions and discuss possible changes to the ontology.

GONUTS is currently set up so anyone can view or search, but only registered users can edit or add pages. Currently registered users can create new users, and we are working to add at least one registered user for each participating database (So far we have registered users at EcoliHub, EcoCyc, GOA, BeeBase, SGD, dictyBase, FlyBase, WormBase, TAIR, Rat Genome Database, ZFIN, MGI, UCL and AgBase...

Platform: Online tool , UCL and AgBase...