A System of Databases for Legume Crops: Peanutbase, Legumeinfo, and the Legume Federation Project.

The USDA-ARS maintains several online databases for crop and model legume species: SoyBase, PeanutBase, and LegumeInfo (also known as the Legume Information System). This talk will describe some key features of these databases, as well as a new project, the "Legume Federation," that aims to get more interoperable software components out into the research communities (closer to the data generators and subject experts), and then make sure that the components and instances work together and can talk to one another. The goals of the Legume Federation include 1) sharing knowledge, development efforts, and data sets across all legume crops; 2) defining standards for data formats, metadata, Web service protocols and ontology use; 3) establishing an open repository for data exchange; 4) encouraging the use of common, open-source model organism database tools. Clear standards and formats, with templates and tools for data collection and submission, should enable broader participation. Although a major focus of the project is on methods for distributed development, we emphasize that the fundamental mission is to enable improved agricultural productivity for this important group of crop plants by integrating genetic, genomic, and phenotypic data across species to enable identification of common molecular bases for important traits.