The Crop Ontology (CO, http://www.cropontology.org/) is a resource of the Integrated Breeding Platform (IBP, http://integratedbreeding.net/) providing breeders with crop specific terms for fieldbook edition and data annotation. Until Mai 2015, a plant phenotype was annotated with 3 CO identifiers for the trait, the method and the scale, respectively. Yet, breeders’ fieldbook and most phenotypic databases are designed to annotate a datapoint with only one identifier.

Mali is one of the least developed countries with an economy that relies heavily on rainfed cereal production. Rural communities are faced with extreme poverty as a result of unpredictable rainfall pattern and lack of appropriate agricultural intervention practices. Most agronomic practices in support of development in the past had emphasized farm-level productivity issues with limited scope for managing interactions among components and actors beyond the level of the farm. Several studies showed different techniques practiced at farm level to improve the agricultural productivity.