FAIRsharing record for: Crop Ontology

This FAIRsharing record describes: Created in 2008 by the CGIAR, the Crop Ontology (CO; http://www.cropontology.org) is an essential source of traits and variables to support the standardization of the breeding databases such as the Integrated Breeding Platform’s BMS (IBP; https://www.integratedbreeding.net/) and the Boyce Thompson Institute’s Breedbase (https://breedbase.org/) (Arnaud et al., 2020). By providing descriptions of agronomic, morphological, physiological, quality, and stress traits along with their definitions and relationships, also including a standard nomenclature for composing the variables, the CO enables digital capture and aggregation of crop trait data, as well as comparison across projects and locations (Shrestha et al, 2012). The crop ontologies follow a conceptual model that defines a phenotypic variable as a combination of a trait, a method and a scale. This model aims at supporting the creation and management of breeders’ field books and the generation of annotated trial data. Annotated data are interpretable, interoperable and reusable. The development of a crop-specific ontology is a community-driven effort which is usually coordinated by a curator (or curators) nominated from within the community itself. CO’s Traits that are properly described following the guidelines are progressively mapped to the Planteome species-neutral Trait Ontology (TO) maintained by Oregon State University.