Plant Ontology Workshop, Botany 2012
Sunday, July 8th, 9:00AM - 12:00PM
Botany 2012 July 7 - 11, 2012 - Columbus, Ohio
Workshop goal will be to teach people (mostly botanists) how to access and use the PO, including how to send feedback, suggest new terms, etc.
Registration for the workshop is free with conference registration.
Abstract: This workshop will introduce participants to the Plant Ontology (PO: http://plantontology.org) and its applications in plant science. The PO is a structured vocabulary, containing terms, attributes of terms, and relationships among terms in the domain of green plant anatomy, morphology and development stages. The PO, along with other ontologies such as the Gene Ontology (GO), is used for systematic annotation or tagging of data documenting associations between genes, gene products, or sequences and the structures or processes to which they contribute. These annotations facilitate computerized searching and reasoning over large data sets from multiple sources, allowing researchers to address questions in comparative genetics, development, and genomics. Recent work links systematic character data to ontology terms. The PO is developing new terms and applications for plant phenotypic character descriptions that can be used for multiple applications, including large-scale phenomic screens of crop species, text-mining of legacy or current literature, and taxonomic descriptions including those of fossils. Tagging taxonomic data with ontology terms enhances the interoperability of morphological character matrices and provides a bridge between genomic data sets and evolutionary biology. The PO is associating images with many of its terms, which together with definitions and links to various types of data, make the PO useful across plant science and for botany educators.
The workshop begins with a brief introduction to the principles and content of the PO. The main activity is a tutorial on how to access the various resources available through the PO website. Participants will learn how to navigate the website, how to interpret an ontology (including relations, definitions, and external references), how to browse or search for ontology terms or annotations, how to submit feedback (including requests for new terms or revised definitions), and how to download and work with ontology and annotation files. Instruction will be available on how to generate association files for genomic projects interested in contributing and maintaining new PO annotations.
Although many individuals working on the genomics of well-studied model organisms are already actively involved in ontology use, botanists working on non-model species or outside genomics may not be utilizing the resources offered by bio-ontologies. We aim to engage a broader user base through this workshop and seek feedback from scientists wishing to use the PO. We expect this workshop will be of interest to researchers in plant development, taxonomy, genomics, and paleobotany. We welcome the participation of educators from all levels.
