Status of the Draft Potato Ontology

Ontologies serve to structure a knowledge domain, share more easily the concepts and facilitate use of terms by both humans and algorithms. Other potential uses include knowledge transfer across species and predictions. The case of potato has several opportunities to test and evaluate the different uses of ontologies: a) potato has more than 100 related wild species b) the potato genome has recently been sequenced as well as that of tomato (sister species to potato) and c) conserved ortholog sequences (COS) markers from Solanaceous species have been mapped in the physical and genetic map of potato. On the other hand potential constraints are: a) potato is outbreeding and has a high level of diversity at genotype and phenotype level; and b) predictivity of transferring knowledge between species has been weak in the past. In this talk we will present main advances and pendings to date around the use of the potato ontology. These include: a) development of a draft potato ontology based on the former FAO/IPGRI/CIP morphological descriptors and extended by trait dictionaries from standardized potato field trial protocols; b) the P4 initiative around the potato genome mapping population the International Potato Center as an initiative open to collaborators for phenotyping and c) a federated web database using biomart for integrating genome scale and field trial data. Current efforts include the addition and standardization of new types of phenotypic characterization as well as improving the ontology draft in terms of coverage of data types and cross linking to the general plant as well as to the Solanaceae Phenotype Ontology.