Ontology Working Group March 6th 2015

Friday March 6th, 2015

Agenda Items: Who: EA, LC, BS, CM, along with new folks: Rosemary Shrestha, Léo Valette, (both from the CGIAR)

Introductions to the working group:

• Léo Valette- New Crop Ontology curator at the Crop Ontology team in Montpellier, thanks to the allocation of an 2015 IBP grant.

- Background: Agronomist, with background in Information Technology - Roles: - Collaborate with each crop curator and with Julian Pietragalla (IBP) to maintain quality Trait Dictionaries for the Breeding Management System and expend the Crop Ontology to new crops.

- Provide help desk for the use of the TD Template, trait alignment and the use of the web site.

- improve content of trait dictionaries

- Curation, redefining the guidelines, improving the template

- Addition of new crops- e.g. Sunflower

• Rosemary Shrestha- Germplasm Data Coordinator, CIMMYT

- Background: Plant Pathology, molecular biology, joined CIMMYT in 2008 to develop ontologies on the GCP project with Elizabeth Arnaud. Worked with Jaiswal group to learnontology building with OBO-Edit- developed the wheat and Maize trait ontologies

- Role at CIMMYT: Germplasm Data Coordinator- to bring the maize and wheat data into the CIMMYT databases, rolling out to the IBP

- Field and nurseries data is stored in the crop research ontology

- Mapping to PO, TO terms in the maize and wheat ontologies

Introduction to the Wheat and Maize Ontologies: Rosemary

Presentation from March 2014 Montpellier meeting:

• Link to Rosemary's Presentation: Maize and Wheat Data Management and Annotation Activities
• Status- Under revision- currently cross-referencing to PO and TO
• Harmonization with the reference ontologies

Germplasm terms: from the GCP Germplasm Ontology

• Not currently being used in the IBP
• passport Info, multi-crop passport descriptors
• GeneBank- needs to be linked to terms

Maize Trait Ontology: Maize trait Ontology

• Managed by Kate Dreher, data manager, CIMMYT
• Maize descriptors- Maize finder, central system
• Collaborating with Mary Scheaffer- MaizeGDB

Crop Research Ontology Crop Research Ontology

• RS: being expanded to include the variables for environment and agronomy, etc
• Integrated with the maize filed book to describe treatments

- Needs to be harmonized with the EO and ENVO - trait methods and scales

• Question: How to best deal with units and scales?

- Unit Ontology