The Generic Model Organism Database (GMOD) project provides biological research communities with a toolkit of open-source software components for visualizing, annotating, managing, and storing biological data.

The GMOD project was started in the early 2000s as a collaboration between several model organism databases (MODs) who shared a need to create similar software tools for processing data from sequencing projects.

MODs, or organism-specific databases, describe genome and other information about important experimental organisms in the life sciences and capture the large volumes of data and information being generated by modern biology.

Chado makes extensive use of controlled vocabularies to type all entities in the database; for example: genes, transcripts, exons, transposable elements, etc., are stored in a feature table, with the type provided by Sequence Ontology.

When a new type is added to the Sequence Ontology, the feature table requires no modification, only an update of the data in the database.