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ARS Home » Midwest Area » Ames, Iowa » Corn Insects and Crop Genetics Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #233853
Title: SoyBase Soybean Ontologies: Pathways to Soybean Growth and Developmental Description

Author
item Nelson, Rex
item Grant, David
item Cannon, Steven
item Shoemaker, Randy

Submitted to: Plant and Animal Genome Conference
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 1/9/2009
Publication Date: 1/13/2009
Citation: Nelson, R., Grant, D.M., Cannon, S.B., Shoemaker, R.C. 2009. SoyBase Soybean Ontologies: Pathways to Soybean Growth and Developmental Description [abstract]. Plant and Animal Genome Conference. Poster No. P797.

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Plant anatomy has been a recognized discipline for many years. As a result, it has a very structured ontology for the anatomical parts of most plants. The same cannot be said for the complicated phenotypic traits of most plants. Listing analogous traits between different plant species is extremely difficult without the assistance of domain experts due to the lack of a standard nomenclature for plant phenotypic variation and traits. This is made more difficult by the use of common-names for traits within a species that differ geographically. In order to provide a resource that would unite geographically distinct terms for the same concepts in soybean we have prepared a number of controlled vocabularies (ontologies) for soybean growth and developmental traits. These ontologies will afford researchers an easy to use web portal that will provide term definitions as well as term synonyms which are fully searchable. This will allow researchers familiar with a geographically distinct term to find all other terms for the same concept and also relate those terms to the larger Plant Ontology Consortium (PO) and Plant Trait Ontology (TO) terms. Mapping soybean common terms to the larger PO and TO terms will greatly facilitate cross-legume and broader plant growth and developmental comparisons by providing a computer or a user an interpretable way to identify analogous structures and traits among plant species. These ontologies are currently available to researchers from the SoyBase homepage (http://soybase.org). Representations of the ontologies and use cases will be presented.