Continued collaboration between AgTrials, CropOntology, AgMIP, CSISA and others
The Climate Change and Agricultural Food Security (CCAFS) program’s AgTrials initiative places a strong emphasis on partnerships with other initiatives, and on interoperability between systems designed for crop improvement applications. On the upstream end, linking to information resources is a critical input to making the agricultural trial database work.
Por Glenn Hyman| Jan 15, 2014
Our collaboration with CropOntology — an international initiative developed by the Generation Challenge Program for standardizing terms related to crops and crop plant traits — illustrates this approach. Their system gives us standardized terminology, allowing us to integrate information across a large number of data providers all over the world. On the downstream end, the AgTrials resource is available to any group that needs this kind of information in applied research. One good example is the Agricultural Modeling Inter-comparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP). AgTrials and AgMIP have already been working to integrate their systems. Expect much more to come in 2014. AgTrials is developing another area of collaboration with the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA). As an example of how these collaborations work, see below a presentation on the CropOntology initiative made at the Plant and Animal Genomics conference in San Diego, USA. The Crop Ontology: a resource for enabling access to breeders’ data from Decision and Policy Analysis Program