<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 goal of the Plant Ontology<sup>™</sup> Consortium is to produce structured controlled vocabularies,
arranged in ontologies, that can be applied to plant-based database information
even as knowledge of the biology of the relevant plant taxa (e.g. development, anatomy,
morphology, genomics, proteomics) is accumulating and changing. The collaborators of the
Plant Ontology<sup>™</sup> Consortium (POC) represent a number of core participant database
groups. The Plant Ontology<sup>™</sup> Consortium is expanding the paradigm of the Gene
Ontology<sup>™</sup> Consortium (http://www.geneontology.org). Various trait ontologies (agronomic
traits, mutant phenotypes, phenotypes, traits, and QTL) and plant ontologies (plant
development, anatomy [incl. morphology]) for several taxa (<italic>Arabidopsis</italic>, maize/corn/<italic>Zea mays</italic>
 and rice/<italic>Oryza</italic>) are under development. The products of the Plant Ontology<sup>™</sup> Consortium will be open-source.</p>
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Comp Funct Genomics. 2002 Apr; 3(2):137-142