Sweet Potato Ontology

Abstract

The sweetpotato ontology is part of a community effort to establish a set standard nomenclature to describe crop development and agronomic traits to facilitate analyzing and sharing of phenotypic and genotypic information. The development and adoption of data standards is vital to the interoperability of sweetpotato data. Phenotype ontologies are controlled, hierarchically-related phenotypic descriptions that enable large-scale computation among individuals, populations, and even multiple species. The International Potato Center (CIP) is currently pursuing the development of standards for plant phenotyping data in collaboration with other interested groups. The advantage of ontology is that both humans and software applications can understand a data domain. This will allow the application of numerical or data mining techniques that may help to uncover previously unknown correlations. Building on previous draft versions, here we focus on traits important to breeding.