The Plant Ontology Consortium (POC) (www.plantontology.org) is a collaborative
effort among several plant databases and experts in plant systematics, botany
and genomics. A primary goal of the POC is to develop simple yet robust
and extensible controlled vocabularies that accurately reflect the biology of plant
structures and developmental stages. These provide a network of vocabularies linked
by relationships (ontology) to facilitate queries that cut across datasets within
a database or between multiple databases. The current version of the ontology
integrates diverse vocabularies used to describe Arabidopsis, maize and rice (Oryza
sp.) anatomy, morphology and growth stages. Using the ontology browser, over 3500
gene annotations from three species-specific databases, The Arabidopsis Information
Resource (TAIR) for Arabidopsis, Gramene for rice and MaizeGDB for maize, can
now be queried and retrieved