Statistics are now computed and tracked at each monthly GO release (http://geneontology.org/stats.html) and serve two purposes: (i) informing users of the changes in both the ontology and annotations and (ii) checking and validating the GO annotations of contributing groups before the GO publishes them in a public release. Although the GO pipeline is fully automated with numerous automated quality checks, we implemented an additional manual review step in which these statistics are evaluated by a quality assurance manager prior to any release. This additional check ensures the quality of our published data.
