Ontology Working Group Meetings- Feb 2015

Tuesday, Feb 10th, 2015

Who: PJ, EA, LC, JE, CM, BS

1. Coordination between the species-specific Crop Ontologies and the reference ontologies- PO, TO, GO etc

PJ: Initial goal will be to work on improving and updating the TO

EA provided an overview of the Crop Ontology curation tool (http://www.cropontology.org/) and some background information about the ontologies and platform.

• Part of the Integrated Breeding Platform
• Common vocabularies are used to integrate data from breeders field book
• 18 crops represented in five sections:
  • General Germplasm Ontology
  • Phenotype and Trait Ontology
  • Structural and Functional Genomic Ontology
  • Location and Environmental Ontology
  • Plant Anatomy & Development Ontology

Cassava Example:

• Based on OBO-Edit
• Excel-based template
• Visualized by the tool

Common Trait Classes (e.g.) : Maize Ontology (http://www.cropontology.org/ontology/CO_322/Maize)

• "Agronomic/Agronomical"
• Morphological
• Stress (Abiotic/Biotic Stresses)
• Phenological
• Quality
• Unit

Relations:

• is_a
• part _of
• method_of
• scale _of
• derived_from

Availability and Formats::

• Download from www.cropontology.org
• API
• Formats include csv, OBO, SKOS, RDF
• Ones in blue are OBO based

Terms have a unique identifier:

• CO_###:#######

2. Prioritizing the work on the species-specific Crop Ontologies- Rice, wheat and Maize

At the PAG meeting- Rice, wheat and Maize were identified as the best candidates to start on

The PO is well set up to provide entity terms for these as they are important crop/model species

The TO has some of the needed terms,but will need additional work

3. Transition to GitHub repository

4. Hiring at Bioversity, OSU and NYBG

5. Possible Ontology development workshop this spring

6. White paper on plant phenotyping standards