<p>This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.</p> <p>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 <italic>Arabidopsis</italic>, maize and rice (<italic>Oryza</italic>
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 <italic>Arabidopsis</italic>, Gramene for rice and MaizeGDB for maize, can
now be queried and retrieved.</p>
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Comp Funct Genomics. 2005 Oct-Dec; 6(7-8):388-397