The BioMoby project began at the Model Organism Bring Your own Database Interface Conference (MOBY-DIC), held in Emma Lake, Saskatchewan on September 21, 2001. It stemmed from a conversation between Mark D Wilkinson and Suzanna Lewis during a [http://geneontology.org] Gene Ontology developers meeting at the Carnegie Institute, Stanford, where the functionalities of the Genquire and Apollo genome annotation tools were being discussed and compared. The lack of a simple standard that would allow these tools to interact with the myriad of data-sources required to accurately annotate a genome was a critical need of both systems.