controlled plant vocabularies

[Peter Stevens]

The Plant Ontology Consortium (www.plantontology.org) is pleased to
announce the first release of the Developmental Ontology for
flowering plants. This ontology is a set of controlled vocabulary
("ontology") terms that describe the developmental stages of organs
and organ systems of a 'generic' flowering plant. The Developmental
Ontology supplements previously-released ontologies that describe
anatomy, morphology, and growth stages of a plant, and is designed
for use by plant databases and researchers to describe the effects of
genes, mutations and environmental permutations on plant structure
and growth using a standardized terminology.

The updated version of the Plant Ontology, which includes the
newly-released  Developmental Ontology, can be viewed and queried
using the Plant  Ontology AmiGO browser (URL:
http://www.plantontology.org/amigo/).

We hope that Plant Ontology will become a useful tool for the plant
research community, and that diverse groups including plant breeders,
geneticists and researchers involved in large scale genomics projects
will benefit from using this resource.

Please feel free to contact us with your suggestions and requests for
new terms in the Plant Ontology.

Best regards,

Plant Ontology Consortium