Aubert C., Buttigieg P.L., Laporte M.A., Devare M., Arnaud E., (2017) CGIAR Agronomy Ontology, http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/agro.owl, licensed under CC BY 4.0
Abstract
An ontology is a formal representation of a disciplinary domain, representing a semantic standard that can be employed to annotate data where key concepts are defined, as well as the relationships that exist between those concepts (Gruber, 2009). Ontologies provide a common language for different kinds of data to be easily interpretable and interoperable allowing easier aggregation and analysis.
The Agronomy Ontology (AgrO) provides terms from the agronomy domain that are semantically organized and can facilitate the collection, storage and use of agronomic data, enabling easy interpretation and reuse of the data by humans and machines alike.
To fully understand the implications of varying practices within cropping systems and derive insights, it is often necessary to pull together information from data in different disciplinary domains. For example, data on-field management, soil, weather and crop phenotypes may need to be aggregated to assess the performance of a particular crop under different management interventions.
However, agronomic data are often collected, described, and stored in inconsistent ways, impeding data comparison, mining, interpretation reuse. The use of standards for metadata and data annotation plays a key role in addressing these challenges. While the CG Core Metadata Schema provides a metadata standard to describe agricultural datasets, the Agronomy Ontology enables the description of agronomic data variables using standard terms.
AgrO is being built from traits and parameters identified by agronomists, the ICASA Data Dictionary, and other existing ontologies such as the Environment Ontology, the Unit Ontology, and the Phenotype and Trait Ontology and enriched with the support of several scientists who bring their domain knowledge.