AGROVOC is a multilingual

controlled vocabulary A controlled vocabulary provides a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval. Controlled vocabularies are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri, taxonomies and other knowledge organization systems. Controlled v ...

covering areas of interest of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), aiming to promote the visibility of research produced among FAO members. By March 2024, AGROVOC consisted of over 42 000 concepts and up to 1 000 000 terms in more than 42 different languages. It is a collaborative effort, the outcome of consensus among a community of experts coordinated by FAO.

History

FAO first published AGROVOC at the beginning of the 1980s 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 is the Food and Agriculture Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations' (FAO) International System for Agricultural Science and Technology, a global public domain database with structured bibliographical records on ...

). In the 1990s, AGROVOC shifted from paper printing to a digital format opting for 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 and reasoning, knowledge representation languages for authoring Ontology (information science), ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe Taxonomy, taxonomies and ...

(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 in different languages. It is employed for tagging resources, allowing searches in a specific language while providing results in many others, enhancing their visibility worldwide. Additionally, it serves for organizing knowledge to facilitate subsequent data retrieval, tagging website content for search engine discovery, standardizing agricultural information data and acting as a reference for translations. Moreover, it finds applications 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.

Maintenance

FAO coordinates the editorial activities related to the maintenance of AGROVOC. Content curation is carried out by a community of editors and institutionsAGROVOC editors
/ref> responsible for each of the language versions. VocBench, is the tool used to edit and maintain AGROVOC in a distributed way. FAO also facilitates the technical maintenance of AGROVOC.

Copyright and license

Copyright for AGROVOC content in FAO languages (English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and Chinese) is held by FAO, while content in other languages stays 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-4.0).

External links

AGROVOC

References