T3: Accessing the Shoulders of Giants.

The Triticeae Toolbox (T3, triticeaetoolbox.org) is the project database for the Triticeae Coordinated Agricultural Project (TCAP). As such it stores and provides public access to all of the wheat and barley data generated by funds awarded to TCAP by USDA-NIFA-AFRI. T3 has also been adopted by the oat community. T3’s five missions are 1) to curate and organize the data to make them easily analyzed and 2) readily available to the public. Centralizing the data 3) facilitates collaboration among TCAP investigators as well as 4) exposing students trained through TCAP to modern data management tools. Finally, 5) T3 serves as a data exploration platform, enabling exploratory analyses and visualizations that also link to domain knowledge on the web.  Thus, T3 enables users to stand on the shoulders of two types of giant. First, the pooling of historical data with current user data in T3 leads to more powerful analyses. Second, discoveries in T3 can be linked to information in knowledge-bases such as GrainGenes and Gramene, leading users to form hypotheses about their findings more easily. A barrier to efficient pooling of data is data heterogeneity. In phenotype space, heterogeneity is minimized by the use of controlled trait vocabularies. In genotype space, we plan to eliminate heterogeneity by imputation to controlled polymorphism sets. Further strides need to be made to facilitate data upload and encourage users to upload data prior to publication.