Identifying term relations cross different gene ontology categories

Background The Gene Ontology (GO) is a community-based bioinformatics resource that employs ontologies to represent biological knowledge and describes information about gene and gene product function. GO includes three independent categories: molecular function, biological process and cellular component. For better biological reasoning, identifying the biological relationships between terms in different categories are important. However, the existing measurements to calculate similarity between terms in different categories are either developed by using the GO data only or only take part of combined gene co-function network information.