For the May 2025 talk of the Monthly Meeting of the #animal-genomics Special Interest Group, we are pleased to host James Reecy (Iowa State University, USA). James Reecy has spent much of his career building tools and frameworks to support data integration, trait standardization, and functional interpretation in livestock genomics. In this talk, he will present an overview of his work on the development of community resources such as the Animal QTL Database (QTLdb) and the Vertebrate Trait Ontology, which aim to harmonize trait definitions and genomic annotations across species. He will also discuss his research spanning transcriptomics, GWAS, and systems biology approaches to better understand the genetic basis of economically important traits. With a strong emphasis on collaboration and data interoperability, his perspective highlights how shared infrastructure and open data standards can accelerate discovery in both animal and comparative genomics.