AGROVOC is a multilingual controlled vocabulary covering all areas of interest of the

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)french: link=no, Organisation des Nations unies pour l'alimentation et l'agriculture; it, Organizzazione delle Nazioni Unite per l'Alimentazione e l'Agricoltura is an intern ...

(FAO), including food, nutrition, agriculture, fisheries, forestry and the environment. By November 2021, the vocabulary consisted of over 39,600 concepts with up to 924,000 terms in up to 41 different languages (se

. It is a collaborative effort, edited by a community of experts and coordinated by FAO. AGROVOC is made available by FAO as an Resource Description Framework, RDF/ SKOS-XL concept scheme and published as a

linked data In computing, linked data (often capitalized as Linked Data) is structured data which is interlinked with other data so it becomes more useful through semantic queries. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but ...

set aligned to 20 other vocabularies.

History

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 the International System for Agricultural Science and Technology (

AGRIS AGRIS (International System for Agricultural Science and Technology) is a global public domain database with more than 12 million structured bibliographical records on agricultural science and technology. It became operational in 1975 and the data ...

). 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 The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe taxonomies and classification networks, essentially defining the structure of knowledge for vario ...

(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.

Usage

Today, AGROVOC is available i
different languages
as a

concept scheme and published as
Linked Open Data (LOD)
It is used for or organizing knowledge for subsequent data retrieval, tagging content in websites, facilitating search engine discovery, standardizing agricultural information data and as reference for translations, and in fields such as data mining, big data, or artificial intelligence. Updated AGROVOC content is released once a month and is available for public use.

Access

AGROVOC is accessible in various ways: * Browse onli

Search and browse AGROVOC concepts via the SKOSMOS interface. * Downlo

RDF-SKOS (AGROVOC only or AGROVOC LOD). * Li

SPARQL endpoint * AGROVOC Web servic

Maintenance

FAO coordinates the editorial activities related to the maintenance of AGROVOC. Content curation is carried out by a community of editors and institutions for each of the language versions. The tool used by the community to edit and maintain AGROVOC i
VocBench
which was designed to meet the needs of the Semantic Web and linked data environments. FAO also facilitates the technical maintenance of AGROVOC, including its publication as
LOD resource
Technical support and infrastructure is provided by the University of Tor VergataTor Vergata University
/ref> (Rome, Italy) which leads the technical development of VocBench.

Copyright and license

Copyright for AGROVOC content in FAO languages - English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and Chinese - is with FAO, while content in other languages rests with the institutions that authored it. AGROVOC thesaurus content in English, Russian, French, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese is licensed under the international Creative Commons Attribution License
CC-BY IGO 3.0
.

External links

AGRIS

AGROVOC

AIMS

FAO

VocBench/Agricultural Ontology Server

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Agrovoc Agricultural databases Knowledge representation Ontology (information science) Food and Agriculture Organization Thesauri