Plant Ontologies

There are several projects to develop ontologies for plants, including the Plant Ontology Consortium [24] which was presented by Leszek Vincent who is working on an ontology for maize anatomy. The consortium is comprised of: Gramene [7] (a mapping between databases of cereals), the Maize mapping project (MaizeDB [9]), the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI [8]) and Arabidopsis. The ontology for Arabiopsis was presented separately by Seung Rhee [20]. The ontology includes:

• A GO compatible system for describing process, function and component
• Controlled vocabularies for developmental stage and anatomy have been developed
• A phenotype ontology is under development in collaboration with POC