The Crop Ontology (CO) is developed collaboratively with partners in response to the need of digital breeding tools to have access to valid lists of defined crop traits and variables. By providing descriptions of agronomic, morphological, physiological, quality, and stress traits along with a standard nomenclature for composing the variables, the CO enables digital capture and aggregation of crop trait data, as well as comparison across multi-location varietal evaluation projects, including Participatory Varietal Selection (PVS) with farmers and surveys with citizen science tools ( e.g. ClimMob).  As a whole, the aim is to describe traits that are important to communities and that simultaneously allows scientists to integrate the traits in a breeding product profile. Today the CO comprises 4,235 traits and 6,151 variables for 31 plant species (www.cropontology.org) and supports to generation of FAIR data.

The Crop Ontology is largely used by data scientists and researchers who also contribute to its content. It is integrated into the Planteome database of crop genetic data (www.plarteome.org; NSF project), in comprehensive breeding management systems and analysis software like the CGIAR Integrated Breeding Platform and Breedbase of the Boyce Thompson Institute, and by national databases such as INRAe GnPIS in France or international projects like Emphasis (European Plant Phenotyping Infrastructures). Agrifood Industry uses the Crop Ontology (e.g. Bayer, KWS, Syngenta) . The Minimum Information About a Plant Phenotype Experiment metadata schema (MIAPPE) and the Breeding Application Programme Interface (BrAPI) are to global metadata standards compliant with the Crop Ontology format.