Information, Knowledge and Agricultural Biodiversity

Plant genetic resources for food and agriculture include an estimated 7.4 million ex situ accessions conserved in genebank collections. The food crops and farm animals we depend upon for our livelihood are exposed to many stresses, such as evolving plant diseases, pests, and climate change. Plant breeding programs require access to novel genetic diversity to maintain and improve food crops to keep pace with these challenges. The amount of data being produced and made available in the modern world has already reached enormous volumes, and the rate of new data creation does not seem to be slowing down. Semantic web technologies have generated positive expectations in the biodiversity informatics community. Ontologies and controlled vocabularies are tools for the development of a shared and agreed standard terminology to organize information and support knowledge representation and management. Accession numbers are human-readable identifiers that have long-standing and proven utility.