The Ontologies Community of Practice: An Initiative by the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture

Heterogeneous and multidisciplinary data generated by research on sustainable global agriculture and agrifood systems requires quality data labelling to be interoperable. As recommended by the FAIR principles, data, labels and metadata must use controlled vocabularies and ontologies that are popular in the knowledge domain and commonly used by the community. Despite the existence of robust ontologies in the Life Sciences, there is currently no agreed full set of ontologies recommended for data annotation across agricultural research disciplines, which may span genetics, environment, agroecology, biology and socioeconomics. In this paper, we discuss the added value of the Ontologies Community of Practice (CoP) of the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture for harnessing relevant ontology expertise. This CoP aims to stimulate knowledge sharing and directly support platform development teams by producing ontologies or contributing missing concepts, recommending best practices and identifying mitigation solutions when gold standard datasets are difficult to attain.