October 2010 Release Page

Aug 12, 2010

A beta version of the latest release of the Plant Ontology is available to user groups, interested parties and reviewers on our AmiGO Browser ( http://beta.plantontology.org:8080/amigo/go.cgi).

The primary structure of the PO, including one branch for Plant Structure Ontology (PSO) and one branch for Plant Growth and Developmental Stage Ontology (PGDSO), has not changed.

The main goal of this round of revisions was to create a framework that could accept new terms from all plants, with the focus on the re-organization of the PSO and minor changes (addition of only three new high-level terms) to the PGDSO.

In the PSO, new top-level terms were added, new definitions were written for many terms (including all top-level terms) and the second an third levels of the ontology were extensively re-organized. An effort was made to insure that widely studied plant structures such as flower, stem, and gamete had working definitions and correct parentage.

Detailed revisions, including the addition of many new terms, were made to the PSO term tuber (PO:0004543) and its is_a and part_of children. This provided a test case for how to build relationships among the parts of a complex structure while at the same time providing much needed terms for annotation of potato genes.

Throughout the revision process, the curators worked to incorporate new advances in ontology design and construction. These included the use of logical text and relational definitions and references to external ontologies where appropriate.

Although this release contains only a few new terms that are specific to taxa outside angiosperms, the new structure will enable us to incorporate these terms in future releases.

The POC is seeking feedback on the beta release. Please use the Feedback Link or contact us at po-discuss@plantontology.org.

For more information about the release, please visit our wikipage with a Summary_of_changes_to_the_Plant_Ontology Summary of Changes (http://wiki.plantontology.org:8080/index.php/)

Summary of changes to the Plant Ontology

How to Provide Feedback

You can send feedback via email from our Feedback link. This is available in the upper left corner of any page on the beta browser. If you have comments on a specific page or term, please include the url of the page/term you are referring to in the appropriate box of the feedback form. Be sure to include your email on the feedback form, so we can contact you with any questions.

You can also contact us at po-discuss@plantontology.org.

All comments from the feedback page go to the po-discuss mailing list. Archives of this list are available at the po-discuss archive.