A Divseek Working Group on Semantics for Harmonizing Trait and Agronomic Data

This working group (WG) seeks to establish best practices for harmonizing data and metadata using trait dictionaries, thesauri, and ontologies, and support knowledge exchange among DivSeek partners. The objectives are to 1) initiate Communities Of Practice (COPs) to identify and prioritize common sets of terms that will be valuable, 2) identify minimum semantic requirements for collecting, sharing and exchanging phenotype data, 3) in collaboration with other WGs propose validated guidelines and best practices for supporting non-ontology experts to contribute their own variables or controlled vocabularies, participate in their maintenance, and implement them for data capture and annotation, 4) support the DivSeek Coordination Unit, which operationalizes and facilitates the implementation of the program of work, and partners in advocating to donors and other appropriate fora for the creation of suitable funding opportunities and development of collaborations. WG Activities include a survey of the existing landscape based on two case studies, validating existing methodologies and trait models, and community engagement. The expected outputs include:

• Tutorials and guidelines for the development of semantic standards and their use by non-experts.
• Test applicability to other crops of the Cookbook developed by the Wheat Data Interoperability WG of the Research Data Alliance.
• Organisation of meetings like the recent PhenoHarmonIS 2016 , France (http://tinyurl.com/COcommunity) to target communities concerned with data harmonization.
• Publication of validated controlled vocabularies, and resulting ontologies and trait dictionaries.
• Test CoP and methodology efficiency on knowledge sharing with the Bambara groundnut community