The Plant Trait Ontology:

Laurel Cooper informed us that she is taking now in charge the curation of the Plant Trait ontology and will develop probably a term submission process as they have now for PO. She is presently improving the TO terms and systematically adding cross referencing to PO concepts in the definition of the Trait.

• ¬ The revised Plant Trait ontology is available for direct browsing on the NCBO Bioportal: http://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/1037
• ¬ Our Crop Ontology is also referenced on the Bioportal but is not yet directly accessible : http://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/1544 . We are in contact with Trish Whetzel for improving this.

We had a group meeting with Laurel Cooper (Plant ontology curator, Oregon University), Naama Menda from Cornell (Solanaceae database curator, Sol Genomic Network), and Rex Nelson from USDA (Soybase curator). Naama also mentioned the Cassava database of Cornell as she knows the team. 

Proposed Collaboration: We then discussed our possible collaboration for getting a single and independent ‘Plant Trait Ontology’  that would overarch our crop specific ontologies by adding across species concepts. It will then create the bridge between our data  annotations. Gramene at the moment does not include all our crops and we cannot access corresponding annotations on this site so for cross referencing our annotations, it seems more efficient to directly connect specific crop databases through a single independent Trait Ontology. All annotations would therefore be associated to a TO term and made accessible. This would support one of our GCP project outputs regarding the collaborative  development of a Trait ontology by an larger international community. Of course each crop group would continue maintaining their specific ontology and trait dictionaries.  Our discussion group had the idea of developing a concept note for our collaboration.

Multi languages:

It could help getting our terms being translated into other language through PO and TO. 

Plant Ontology:  Plant Ontology Browser: (http://www.plantontology.org/amigo/go.cgi) 

For complete details regarding the changes in latest release,visit the Summary of Changes Page: http://wiki.plantontology.org/index.php/Summary_of_Changes_to_PO_April_201

The glossary for a quick way to find definitions, IDs and links to PO terms on the browser. The Plant Anatomy Glossary: (http://www.plantontology.org/db/glossary/glossary). 

For more information and to view a summary of the release statistics, please visit: Current Release Notes Page: (http://www.plantontology.org/docs/release_notes/index.html).

In the past Rosemary sent list of new terms to the PO team and had thematic meetings with them. We would need therefore to decide what is the best way for each Crop ontology curator to post new terms to PO and then, TO.