MGED standards: work in progress.

The Microarray Gene Expression Data (MGED) society is an international organization established in 1999 for facilitating sharing of functional genomics and proteomics array data. To facilitate microarray data sharing, the MGED society has been working in establishing the relevant data standards. The three main components (which will be described in more detail later) of MGED standards are Minimum Information About a Microarray Experiment (MIAME), a document that outlines the minimum information that should be reported about a microarray experiment to enable its unambiguous interpretation and reproduction; MAGE, which consists of three parts, The Microarray Gene Expression Object Model (MAGE-OM), an XML-based document exchange format (MAGE-ML), which is derived directly from the object model, and the supporting tool kit MAGEstk; and MO, or MGED Ontology, which defines sets of common terms and annotation rules for microarray experiments, enabling unambiguous annotation and efficient queries, data analysis and data exchange without loss of meaning. We discuss here how these standards have been established, how they have evolved, and how they are used.