The main objective of the Plant Ontology Consortium (POC) is to develop, curate and share controlled vocabularies (ontologies) that describe plant structures and growth and developmental stages, providing a semantic framework for meaningful cross-species queries across databases. The Plant Ontology (PO) has been developed and maintained with the primary goal to facilitate and accommodate functional annotation efforts in plant databases and by the plant research community at large. The initial releases of the PO integrated existing ontologies for Arabidopsis, maize and rice; more recent versions of the ontology encompass terms relevant to Fabaceae, Solanaceae and other cereal crops. As a part of the POC project, participating databases such as TAIR, NASC, Gramene and MaizeGDB have been using PO to describe expression patterns of genes and phenotypes of mutants and natural variants. The Plant Ontology Consortium (POC) is funded by the National Science Foundation. ... [Information of the supplier]
