AGROVOC

AGROVOC (a portmanteau of agriculture and vocabulary) is a multilingual controlled vocabulary covering all areas of interest to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), including food, nutrition, agriculture, fisheries, forestry and the environment. The vocabulary consists of over 32,000 concepts with up to 40,000 terms in 23 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Czech, English, French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lao, Malay, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Telugu, Thai, Turkish and Ukrainian. It is a collaborative effort, edited by a community of experts and coordinated by FAO.

AGROVOC is made available by FAO as an RDF/SKOS-XL concept scheme and published as a linked data set aligned to 16 other vocabularies.

AGROVOC was first published at the beginning of the 1980s by FAO in English, Spanish and French to serve as a controlled vocabulary to index publications in agricultural science and technology, especially for AGRIS.

In the 1990s, AGROVOC abandoned paper printing and went digital with data storage handled by a relational database. In 2004, preliminary experiments with expressing AGROVOC into the Web Ontology Language(OWL) took place. At the same time a web based editing tool was developed, then called WorkBench, nowadays VocBench. In 2009 AGROVOC became an SKOS resource.

Today, AGROVOC is available in 23 languages as an SKOS-XL concept scheme and published as a Linked Open Data (LOD) set aligned to 16 other data sets related to agriculture.

AGROVOC is used by researchers, librarians and information managers for indexing, retrieving and organizing data in agricultural information systems and web pages. Within the context of the Semantic Web also new users are emerging, like software developers and ontology builders.

AGROVOC is accessible in various ways:

The AGROVOC team, located at FAO Headquarter, coordinates the editorial activities related to the maintenance of AGROVOC. The actual maintenance is carried out by a community of editors and institutions for each of the 23 language versions.

The tool used by the community to edit and maintain AGROVOC is Vocbench, which was designed to meet the needs of the Semantic Web and linked data environments. VocBench provides tools and functionalities that facilitate both collaborative editing and multilingual terminology. It also includes administration and group management features that permit flexible roles for maintenance, validation and quality assurance.

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