Within the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR; www.cgiar.org) consortium, the volume of agriculture-related information is increasing enormously. The CGIAR has accumulated historic crop data that are related to phenotype, breeding, germplasm, pedigree, traits for the past six or seven decades. The Generation Challenge Programme (GCP; http://www.generationcp.org under GCP Semantics ... GCP Ontology menu item) central data repository system (http://gcpcr.grinfo.net/) also contains data related to both genotype and phenotype. To facilitate smooth data exchange across databases and data annotation, controlled vocabulary system is urgently needed. Most terms associated with phenotypes are not well covered by current existing ontologies. Therefore, GCP deployed crop ontology (CO) site (http://pantheon.generationcp.org) which characterizes the computational architecture of a knowledge-based system. At present, CO focuses on developing crop-specific trait ontology for chickpea, maize, Musa, potato, rice, sorghum and wheat crops. The GCP Crop Ontology browser is available at http://koios.generationcp.org/ontology-lookup/ for searching ontology terms or specific ontology hierarchy present in CO. With the inception of CO project, the rice mutant ontology is integrated as a GCP Crop Ontology resource, and each mutant phenotype controlled vocabulary is now an ontology term in the GCP rice mutant ontology. Application of the crop ontology and its integration into the International Crop Information System (ICIS) and other crop databases has been started. Collaboration with Gramene Trait Ontology (TO) and Plant Ontology (PO) is continued by submitting CO terms as new terms to these databases. Further collaboration is being processed with AGROVOC, Thai Rice Ontology, SGN genomic network, and MaizeGDB.

Genetic Resources Program

English

Lucia Segura

INT2832

CIMMYT Staff Publications Collection