Building an Ontology for the Domain of Plant Science using Protégé

Abstract: Due to the rapid development of technology, large amounts of heterogeneous data generated every day. Biological data is also growing in terms of the quantity and quality of data considerably. Despite the attempts for building a uniform platform to handle data management in Plant Science, researchers are facing the challenge of not only accessing and integrating data stored in heterogeneous data sources but also representing the implicit and explicit domain knowledge based on the available plant genomic and phenomic data. Ontologies provide a framework for describing the structures and vocabularies to support the semantics of information and facilitate automated reasoning and knowledge discovery. In this paper, we focus on building an ontology for Arabidopsis Thaliana in Plant Science domain. The aim of this study is to provide a conceptual model of Arabidopsis Thaliana as a reference plant for botany and other plant sciences, including concepts and their relationships.