EURISCO Advisory Committee meeting, Gatersleben, Germany, 11 October 2018
The Committee appreciated the progress made by the EURISCO team, including the recent opening to phenotypic data and the new search function that enables capturing taxonomic synonyms and misspellings. The current role of EURISCO in the international PGR information landscape was acknowledged important, especially its networking function, operating as a hub for the European national inventories and acting as a platform for the European PGR genebank documentation community. A possible role for the future might extend to becoming a help-desk to advise on genebank documentation systems. It was acknowledged that the EURISCO and Genesys interfaces are currently partially overlapping and this may require simplification in the future. For the harmonization of phenotypic data existing ontologies, such as Crop Ontology, were mentioned as a possible valid reference to point at, but a final decision will require more investigation on pros and cons. For the extension of EURISCO to in situ (crop wild relatives) and on-farm data, it will be necessary to wait for the results and concepts being developed by the project Farmer’s Pride. Focus of EURISCO during Phase X will be on phenotypic data, crop wild relative in situ data and data quality improvement. It was proposed to arrange additional awareness-raising of users in consultation with ESA. The EURISCO Advisory Committee agreed to consult more frequently and to contribute to the development of the annual workplans. The new permanent member of the Committee, A.-F. Adam-Blondon, was welcomed, replacing the retiring Ian Thomas, to whom thanks and good wishes were dedicated.