AgroPortal: an open repository of ontologies and vocabularies for agriculture and nutrition data

International audience; Similarly to what happens in biomedicine, communities engaged in agronomic research need to access specific sets of ontologies for data annotation and integration. For instance, it has been established that the scientific challenges in plant breeding have switched from genetics to phenotyping and that standard traits/phenotypes vocabularies are necessary to facilitate breeder’s data integration and comparison. In parallel of very specific crop dictionaries, important organizations have produced large reference vocabularies such as AGROVOC (Food and Agriculture Organization), NAL Thesaurus (National Agricultural Library) or the CAB Thesaurus (Centre for Agricultural Bioscience International). The more ontologies are being produced in the domain, the more the need to create, store and retrieve alignments between those ontologies become important. In fact, there exists a need of a one-stop-shop for agronomical, environmental and food related ontologies enabling to identify and select an ontology for a specific task as well as offering generic services to exploit them in search, annotation or other scientific data management processes