ATOL: The Multi-species Livestock Trait Ontology.

This paper presents the multi-species Animal Trait Ontology for Livestock (ATOL) and the methodology used for its design. ATOL has been designed as a reference source for indexing phenotype databases and scientific papers. It covers five major topics related to animal productions: growth and meat quality, animal nutrition, milk production, reproduction and welfare. It is composed of species-independent concepts subsuming species-specific ones so that cross-species and species-specific reasoning can be performed consistently. In order to ensure a large consensus, three complementary approaches have successively been applied to its design: reuse of existing ontologies, integration of production-specific livestock traits by a large team of domain experts and curators and terminology analysis of scientific papers. It resulted in a detailed taxonomy of 1,654 traits that is available at http://www.atol-ontology.com