Missouri Botanical Garden Open Conference Systems, TDWG 2016 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

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An Introduction to the Plant Phenology Ontology
Brian J. Stucky, Ramona L. Walls, Kjell Bolmgren, John Deck, Ellen G. Denny, Robert P. Guralnick

Building: CTEC
Room: Auditorium
Date: 2016-12-06 03:00 PM – 03:15 PM
Last modified: 2016-10-15

Abstract


Plant phenology — the timing of plant life-cycle events, such as flowering or leafing-out — has cascading effects on multiple levels of biological organization, from individuals to ecosystems, and is crucial for understanding the links between climate and biological communities.  Today, thanks to data digitization and aggregation initiatives, phenology monitoring networks, and the efforts of citizen scientists, more phenologically relevant data is available than ever before.  Unfortunately, combining these data in large-scale analyses remains prohibitively difficult, mostly because the organizations producing phenological data are using non-standardized terminologies and metrics during data collection and data processing.  The Plant Phenology Ontology (PPO) is a collaborative effort to help solve this problem by developing the standardized terminology, definitions, and term relationships that are needed for large-scale data integration.  In this talk, I will give an overview of the PPO, including the high-level design of the ontology, examples with real phenological data, and future development efforts.