cacao

is a Data Source.

CACAO is a Gene Ontology annotation competition from Texas A&M University in which students curate GO annotations for UniProt proteins from published papers, with evidence codes from the Evidence and Conclusion Ontology. Run from 2010 to 2020 as the Community Assessment of Community Annotation with Ontologies on the GONUTS wiki, it relaunched in 2024 as Creating Annotations through Critical Analysis of Original research at cacao.wiki. Accepted annotations are contributed to the Gene Ontology Consortium; QuickGO lists 4,373 annotations assigned by CACAO.

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Domains

genomics

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Homepage

cacao

Repository

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External IDs
  • Infores: infores:cacao

Product Summary

Contacts

CACAO, Texas A&M University

URL: https://cacao.wiki/

Deborah A. Siegele

Github: dsiegele

Jolene Ramsey

Github: jrr-cpt

Products

From this Resource
ID Name URL Category Format Description
cacao.portal CACAO Platform cacao.wiki Graphical Interface http CACAO annotation competition platform...
cacao.go-annotations CACAO GO Annotations annotations?assignedBy=CACAO Product http GO annotations contributed by CACAO c...
cacao.gowiki CACAO GO Wiki Page Category:CACAO Graphical Interface http Archived GONUTS wiki category for the...
cacao.api GONUTS MediaWiki API api.php Programming Interface http MediaWiki API endpoint for accessing ...

Details

Community Assessment of Community Annotation with Ontologies

Overview

CACAO (Community Assessment of Community Annotation with Ontologies) was an educational and collaborative annotation project that engaged undergraduate students in the process of biological curation using the Gene Ontology (GO). Students learned to annotate proteins by extracting evidence from scientific literature and applying standardized ontology terms.

Project Goals

  • Education: Train undergraduate students in biocuration and scientific literature analysis
  • Community Engagement: Involve the broader scientific community in annotation efforts
  • Quality Assessment: Evaluate the quality of community-contributed annotations
  • GO Annotation: Contribute to the Gene Ontology annotation corpus

Methodology

  • Students read and analyzed scientific papers
  • Extracted evidence for protein function
  • Applied appropriate Gene Ontology terms
  • Documented evidence codes and supporting references
  • Annotations were reviewed for quality and consistency

Educational Value

  • Hands-on experience with scientific literature
  • Understanding of controlled vocabularies and ontologies
  • Critical thinking about biological evidence
  • Contribution to real scientific resources
  • Introduction to bioinformatics and data curation

Activity Status

The CACAO project appears to be inactive. The project website at gowiki.tamu.edu is no longer accessible, and recent updates or publications are not available. The project represents an important historical effort in community-based biocuration and educational outreach.

  • Gene Ontology: The ontology system used for annotations
  • GOC (Gene Ontology Consortium): Maintains GO and coordinates curation efforts
  • GONUTS: Related community annotation project

Legacy

CACAO demonstrated the potential for engaging students and community members in scientific annotation while providing valuable educational experiences in biocuration and biological data standards.

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Created: October 30, 2025 | Last modified: October 04, 2026