The American Society of Plant Biologists was founded in 1924 to promote the growth and development of plant biology, to encourage and publish research in plant biology, and to promote the interests and growth of plant scientists in general.
The Botany Department was founded as part of the California Academy of Natural Sciences in 1853. The early herbarium (now CAS) included specimens collected by Dr. Albert Kellogg, a medical practitioner and one of the founders of the Academy. Over the next fifty years, Kellogg's collections were augmented by the collections of Dr. John Allen Veatch, Dr. Hans Herman Behr (author of the first flora of San Francisco), William G.W. Harford, Dr. Gustav Eisen, Dr. Katherine Layne Curran Brandegee, and Miss Alice Eastwood. These early collections of California, Oregon, Alaska, Baja California, and other parts of western North America were some of the most important of their day.
Overview of Ontologies and Controlled Vocabularies: Controlled vocabulary terms, retrieved from an appropriate ontology, facilitate the assignment of descriptive biological and botanical terms to genetic map and physical map data. The resultant mapping facilitates data retrieval and comprehension of data within a database. The application of ontology products should also facilitate the communication between plant-based databases (interoperability), providing a uniform platform for queries based on controlled vocabularies. The terms used in the controlled vocabularies are derived from internationally published sources.
Natural Selection is a gateway to quality, evaluated Internet resources in the natural world - subject coverage includes botany, zoology, palaeontology, ecology and environmental science. The service aims to help anyone with a purposeful interest in these subjects - from school children to senior researchers - locate quality, relevant Internet resources quickly and reliably.
This site contains ontologies and points to some other efforts within the community. Ideally we see a range of ontologies being designed for biomedical domains. Some of these will be generic and apply across all organisms and others will be more restricted in scope, for example to specific taxonomic groups.
Plant Ontology Consortium (POC) aims to develop, curate and share controlled vocabularies (ontologies) that describe plant structures and growth/ developmental stages providing a semantic framework for meaningful cross-species queries across databases. The first task of the POC project is to efficiently integrate diverse vocabularies currently in use to describe anatomy, morphology and growth and developmental stages in Arabidopsis, maize and rice. In coming years, POC will extend this controlled vocabulary to encompass Fabaceae, Solanaceae and other plant families.