Ontology Working Group Meeting, Tuesday April 7th, 2015

Who: LC, EA, LV, JE

1. Updates on hiring etc

At the Crop Ontology in Montpellier, the postdoctoral position has been offered to Marie Angelique Laporte. She will probably join the team around mid April.

OSU- review of applicants is underway

NYBG- no report as yet

2. Guidelines for writing good definitions- Barry Smith Barry presented a short slide set- see attached: outlining the best practices for ontology design and writing definitions.

- need for genus- differentia format, single parentage of terms

- proposed idea for TO: 2 versions:

- editors version "asserted"- species neutral and widely applicable

- public/ live version- "inferred" version- containing the species specific definitions

3. Finalizing the response to Clement and Pierre

- clarified a few points, EA will send out tomorrow

4. Leo- update on revisions to Rice Trait Ontology, issues with using SVN

- working with RSH, but he is quite busy

- EA sent RSH the name of person who might be able to help- Berta?

- trouble shooting issues of SVN access with JE, possible call on THurs am if still on going

• Discussion about how to deal with the revising on definitions in the CGIAR ontologies- current definitions are displayed in the Fieldbook and are in there format that the breeders are used to. Could we possibly have an additional field for the " ontology definition" ?
• Could the backend be modified so that the comment is displayed in the field book rather than the def'n ? Then we could rewrite the def'ns in ontology language and move the breeders def'n to the comment field.
• Another alternative is to have the ontology in OBO or owl and create a script that exports the breeder version to the trait template for import into the IBP Fieldbook. ????

5. Plans for Trait Ontology revisions, work on CGIAR wheat and maize trait ontology