Wheat Crop Ontology : A Species Specific Trait Ontology. Use Case : The URGI Information System

An Ontology defines a common structured vocabulary for sharing information in a knowledge domain. Large international programs have been launched on small grain cereals and will generate a large amount of phenotyping data on different germplasms, different environments and at different scales. A common Ontology will enable to better curate, integrate and analyze data at different levels within a project and between projects. It may also be used to generate standardized field books to facilitate database integration. This ontology will ease the building of large datasets.  Their usefulness for powerful meta-analyses to identify robust processes has been largely demonstrated.
The Generation Challenge Program (GCP) initiated the development of a Crop Ontology (CO) in 2008 with the CGIAR centers and national institutions. This work is primarily conducted by Bioversity International and coordinated by Elizabeth Arnaud. Rosemary Shrestha has been coordinating up to now the CO community and its implementation in crop-specific databases.
The Breedwheat project is capitalizing on the GCP effort by contributing to the GCP Wheat CO (http://www.cropontology.org/ontology/CO_321/) and uses it as a common data annotation referential. Jacques Le Gouis (INRA, GDEC) and Cyril Pommier (INRA, URGI) are coordinating the submission of new terms for Breedwheat, INRA and their partners.

This ontology will be used in the URGI integrative information system, GnpIS (http://urgi.versailles.inra.fr/gnpis), and more precisely by the Ephesis application (http://urgi.versailles.inra.fr/ephesis). This ontology based web application allows querying, filtering, organizing and exporting plant phenotypic experiment data. Ephesis is therefore a foundation for Transplant distributed repository for Phenotype data.