Towards a Reference Plant Trait Ontology for Modeling Knowledge of Plant Traits and Phenotypes

Abstract

Ontology engineering and knowledge modeling for the plant sciences is expected to contribute to the understanding of the basis of plant traits that determine phenotypic expression in a given environment. Several crop- or clade-specific plant trait ontologies have been developed to describe plant traits important for agriculture in order to address major scientific challenges such as food security. We present three successful species and/or clade-specific ontologies which address the needs of crop scientists to quickly access a wide range of trait related data, but their scope limits their interoperability with one another. In this paper, we present our vision of a species-neutral and overarching Reference Plant Trait Ontology which would be the basis for linking the disparate knowledge domains and that will support data integration and data mining across species.