Achievement

A letter to Nature of June 19, 2008 by representatives of a number of leading bioscience groups, entitled "Working Together to Put Molecules on the Map", looked forward to a time when biosamples, soil, sediment, seawater or ice-core samples, collected by biologists for example in the course of studies of epidemics or of biodiversity, will routinely be associated with real-time geographical information provided the use of hand-held GPS devices. To make this possible, controlled structured vocabularies for describing geographical phenomena have been developed by bioinformaticians under the auspices of the EnvO (Environmental Ontology) initiative, in which Buffalo IGERT scientists have played an important role (see http://environmentontology.org). Collaborators on this initiative include the Genomic Standards Consortium, the Tree of Life Web Project, the Gramene plant ontology, the Digital Earth Project, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, and the StrainInfo Bioportal.