The Plant Ontology Database: a community resource for plant structure and developmental stages controlled vocabulary and annotations

The Plant Ontology Consortium (POC, http://www.plantontology.org) is a collaborative effort among model plant genome databases and plant researchers that aims to create, maintain and facilitate the use of a controlled vocabulary (ontology) for plants. The ontology allows users to ascribe attributes of plant structure (anatomy and morphology) and developmental stages to data types, such as genes and phenotypes, to provide a semantic framework to make meaningful cross-species and database comparisons. The POC builds upon groundbreaking work by the Gene Ontology Consortium (GOC) by adopting and extending the GOC's principles, existing software and database structure. Over the past year, POC has added hundreds of ontology terms to associate with thousands of genes and gene products from Arabidopsis, rice and maize, which are available through a newly updated web-based browser (http://www.plantontology.org/amigo/go.cgi) for viewing, searching and querying. The Consortium has also implemented new functionalities to facilitate the application of PO in genomic research and updated the website to keep the contents current. In this report, we present a brief description of resources available from the website, changes to the interfaces, data updates, community activities and future enhancement.