Towards common standards, guidelines for measurement and data management in cattle research
Résumé
SmartCow project developed a common framework regarding standards, measurements, and data management to ensure high quality data production with regard to routine and experimental measurements and recordings in cattle physiology and behaviour. Experimental guidelines and protocols were published as an Open Access living handbook on PUBLISSO entitled ‘Methods in cattle physiology and behaviour research – Recommendations from the SmartCow consortium’. The book currently includes 19 chapters covering ethics in experiments on live cattle, intake and behaviour, body condition and anatomy, reproductive, stress and health assessment, rumen function, nutrient digestibility and balance studies, respiratory chamber facility and techniques to measure gas emissions (https://books. publisso.de/en/publisso_gold/publishing/books/overview/53/199). Each chapter lists specific animal traits referring to their identifiers in the Animal Trait Ontology of Livestock (ATOL) and the Environmental Ontology of Livestock (EOL). Vice versa, 92 new traits identified in the published guidelines were included in the existing ontologies. The notable new traits are: milk ketone body content, milking volume, lactation number, stage of lactation, rumen volatile fatty acid content, days of pregnancy, etc. All data providers have access for to the ontologies (http://www.atol-ontology.com/en/erter-2/). Agrimetrics authored a data management plan to set out the approach to managing data within the project, and delivered a Cloud-Based Data Platform (CBDP). The CBDP is designed to ensure the interoperability, sharing and exploitation of the data according FAIR principles. A SmartCow ontology including ATOL and ETOL represents the data and allows researchers to upload and semantically link data with that of other groups of researchers. Data that was not collected or observed at the same time can now be queried together and exported, into an environment of the user’s choice, for further analysis.