Webinar: Introduction to Ontologies

Date: Monday, 11 September 2017, 3pm Central European Time

Duration: 60 min

Presenters:

Elizabeth Arnaud -Bioversity International. Since 2008, Elisabeth leads the Crop Ontology project (www.cropontology.org) at Bioversity International. The project started with the Integrated Breeding Platform and provides crop traits and standard variables for more than 20 crops to support fieldbook design and phenotypic data annotations. Elizabeth also co-leads the CGIAR Agronomy Ontology & Fieldbook project, as well as the NSF-awarded Planteome project for the development of reference plant ontologies (http://planteome.org). She is the co-chair of the CGIAR Ontology Working Group and the coordinator of the Ontology CoP of the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture.

Marie-Angelique Laporte - Ontology engineer and postdoctoral fellow at Bioversity International supported by the NSF awarded Planteome project. Her PhD focused on the definition of data standards related to functional plant traits in the context of biodiversity studies, and she developed an ontology for functional plant traits during her internship at NCEAS (National Center for Ecological synthesis and Analysis), Santa Barbara, USA. Since the last three years, Marie has provided conceptual and technical inputs into the development of the Crop and Agronomy Ontologies, and has mapped the Crop Ontology traits to the reference ontologies (Plant Ontology, Trait Ontology, PATO, etc.) for Planteome.

Content:

1. What is an Ontology: from controlled vocabularies to semantic-rich ontologies [Marie-Angelique]

2. Why agricultural data needs ontologies and how we can use them [Elizabeth]

This seminar provided an introduction to the concept and use of ontologies in science compared to simple controlled vocabularies and thesauri of concepts. We discussed why ontologies are necessary for agricultural data and how they can be applied for quality data annotation. The current lack of a globally shared semantic framework for the acquisition, storage and data management of agricultural data hampers optimized comparisons of farm management scenarios. The consistent use of data standards and ontologies can allow sharing and re-use of scientific data sets to overcome such challenges.

Introduction to Ontologies in Science webinar 11 Sept 2017 — video recording

What is an Ontology: from controlled vocabularies to semantic-rich ontologies — PowerPoint presentation by M-A Lapporte, Bioversity International