Contribute to our broker ontology

Ontologies are crucial for the standardized annotation of experimental data and workflows. They offer clear definitions and relationships of terms that are relevant for a specific research domain. To simplify the use of ontologies for data annotation, several ontologies that are of relevance for plant sciences are integrated by DataPLANT. By using our spreadsheet-based tool Swate for data annotation, users can easily search for terms while creating annotation tables and will get suggestions of suitable ontology terms. However, not every term needed for data annotation will already exist in an ontology.

To close this ontology gap, we created the DataPLANT biology ontology (DPBO) to serve as a broker between scientists annotating their data and main ontology providers.

When a user is missing a term for data annotation, they can simply suggest adding it to the DPBO by a GitHub issue. Our ontology curators will check whether the term already exists in external ontologies and either import the term into our database or create a new term in the DPBO to make it readily available for data annotation in Swate.

If the term did not previously exist in an ontology, our ontology curators will suggest the term to be added to a suitable external ontology. This way, little by little, missing terms for data annotation should become available in commonly used ontologies. To read more about DataPLANT’s ontology service landscape, you can read our Knowledge Base article. To directly contribute to our DPBO, visit our GitHub repository.