A Plant Ontology Web Service for the AIP

The Arabidopsis Information Portal provides a unique opportunity to re-purpose existing plant science web services on a secure, authenticated platform designed to foster interaction amongst heterogeneous data sources. The Plant Ontology (http://www.plantontology.org), which is continuing its development under the new NSF-funded cROP (Common Reference Ontologies for Plant Biology, http://crop.cgrb.oregonstate.edu) project, already delivers both ontology term search and term detail web services for use in desktop, browser, and mobile applications. However, by partnering with AIP, these services can broaden their reach to new developer communities, standardize and modernize their interfaces, and benefit from the Araport authentication environment. As a prototype investigation, we propose to develop an AIP wrapper for the Plant Ontology web services and a parallel Araport application providing a Plant Ontology lookup service. In the future, we foresee opportunities to provision additional web services - such as Gramene’s Plant Reactome RESTful API (http://plantreactome.gramene.org) - on the Araport platform, leading to useful cross-development and data-sharing with other AIP data providers.