POC Conf. Call 6-7-11

POC meeting, Webex Conference Call; Date: Tuesday June 7th, 2011 10am (PDT)

In attendance:

POC members:

Absent:

Collaborators:

Acceptance of the minutes from the POC_Conf._Call_5-24-11?

Priorities for the Next Round of Revisions

Target date for the next release

Next release should come out in mid-September????

Defining Goals and Priorities for the next round of revisions:

Tech Issues: -Upgrade to new version AmiGO browser

Report from the Phenotype RCN Meeting: June 1-3rd, Boulder CO

PJ, LC and RW will attend

From preliminary agenda:

Overall goals for this plant working group meeting:

• Discuss how PO (Plant Ontology) can serve as the reference ontology for all plants and come up with a list of specific changes that will be needed.

• Explore how links can be made to taxonomic databases like RegNum to define the taxonomic scope of terms.

• Clarify the role of TO (trait ontology) - should it be used as a set of pre-composed EQ terms for all plant taxa and all areas of plant biology including systematics?

See discussion: POC_Conf._Call_5-24-11#Review_of_leaf_terms_for_Phenotype_RCN_meeting_next_week

Items arising from the reviews:

Children of leaf- feedback from TAIR

Hi Laurel,

We've been discussing the handling the part_of children of leaf as described in your email and wanted to give you our feedback.

1. Contrary to the current PO approach, we strongly support creating specific vascular and non-vascular children for leaf apex and similar terms that are part_of leaf. We are not worried about term inflation and think that it will be much easier for annotators to choose the specific term they need as opposed to having to remember to co-annotate or having a script go in after and clean up. This also benefits the researcher who is looking for very specific information.

Our suggestion also means creating more specific terms for the is_a children of vascular leaf, like cauline leaf.

For example, 'cauline leaf, margin' and 'rosette leaf margin' would be created. We think that the added granularity of these terms is a benefit.

In fact, without these more specific child terms, it appears that PO is many missing terms, like those describing the leaf apex in rosette leaves and cauline leaves.

PO looks like it has not addressed the fact that rosette leaves have leaf apices, etc. This is easily solved with the more granular term addition. If you don't want to create every possible combination just yet, perhaps just make the terms which you know already would have annotations attached to them, like 'vascular leaf margin' (current Arabidopsis, rice, maize annotations to 'leaf margin') and then add other terms upon request by annotators or users.

A researcher browsing through the ontology would not know to look at annotations to see that there are combinations of annotations that give the 'same' result ('leaf apex' + 'rosette leaf'). I don't think we can expect these users to look at annotation guidelines to figure out why these terms are not present. The current functionality of AmiGO does not allow a search for gene products annotated to Term A AND TermB.

Also, what happens if a gene is expressed in 'cauline leaf' AND 'rosette leaf' but only in the leaf margin of cauline leaves and in the leaf apex of rosette leaves? How will the combinatorial solution work then? How do we know which 'part' goes with which 'leaf'? Unless the co-annotations are captured in a single line in the gaf file (possible with column 16), this could lead to misinformation.

2. Taxon id checks are a great idea in general, not just for the leaf terms.

We strongly support this quality control check to make sure that species/taxa-specific terms are not being erroneously applied.

Let's keep discussing these topics.

On behalf of the TAIR team, Tanya

Upcoming meetings 2011:

2011 Semantic Web Workshop June 6th and 7th, Santa Fe, NM.

Hosted by Damian Gessler and the iPlant Collaborative, this two-day workshop will focus on biological applications for semantic web services.

-JE and JP will be attending

-JE has already worked with Damian to implement a SSWAP web service for PO terms, so further collaboration with him and iPlant will benefit the POC going forward.

For more Workshop details: Semantic web.

Botany 2011 Meeting [Botany 2011] St. Louis, MO at the Chase Park Plaza, July 9-13.

Societies participating: Society for Economic Botany, the American Fern Society (AFS), the American Society of Plant Taxonomists (ASPT), and the Botanical Society of America (BSA).

Anybody going??

* ICBO 2011 Second International Conference on Biomedical Ontology July 26-30, 2011 Buffalo, New York

ICBO

LC is co-organizing the workshop "From Fins to Limbs to Leaves: Facilitating anatomy ontology interoperability" along with Melissa Haendel, Chris Mungall, Alan Ruttenberg, David Osumi-Sutherland.

Full-Day Workshops Schedule:

July 26 9am-6pm The Ontological Representation of Adverse Events: Working with Multiple Biomedical Ontologies

July 27 8.30am-4pm Facilitating Anatomy Ontology Interoperability

July 26 6.30pm-9pm Evening Workshop: Common Logic

July 27 4pm-8pm Evening Workshop: Doctoral and Post-Doctoral Consortium

- LC will attend and represent the PO. Invite other plant people?

*Plant Biology 2011, Aug 6-10th, Minneapolis, Minn

Plant Biology 2011

For inclusion on the program memory stick and in the program book, abstracts must be submitted by May 27.

Gramene will be putting together a workshop again, focusing on pathways. LC and PJ will present a PO poster.

TAIR (Kate Dreher) is organizing an Outreach Booth and we are invited to take part.

* International Botanical Congress (IBC2011)

July 23rd-30th 2011, Melbourne, Australia

Registration is open Important dates

Symposium 'Bio-Ontologies for the Plant Sciences' under the Genetics, Genomics and Bioinformatics theme, wiil be held on Thursday, 27 July, from 13:30 to 15:30.

Dennis, Alejandra, Pankaj and Ramona are planning to attend.

See IBC 2011 Bio-Ontologies Symposium wiki page for more details