AGROVOC Thesaurus

Submitted by drupalAdmin on Thu, 2009-11-19 09:42

AGROVOC is a multilingual, structured and controlled vocabulary designed to cover the terminology of all subject fields in agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food and related domains (e.g. environment).
The AGROVOC Thesaurus was developed by FAO and the Commission of the European Communities in the early 1980s. Since then it has been updated continuously by FAO and local institutions in member countries.

General information
Vocabulary type: 
Thesaurus
Author or Editor: 
Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
Update frequency: 
Until recently AGROVOC was updated on a yearly basis. The decision has now been taken to provide updates on a periodic basis - on average every three months. AGROVOC users are encouraged to propose terms for inclusion in the database. Their suitability, for inclusion in the thesaurus, is then assessed by the AGROVOC team in FAO.
Vocabulary URL: 

http://www4.fao.org/agrovoc/default.htm

Was vocabulary created as a course project: 
No
Scope and Usage
Languages: 

online: English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Portuguese

Major subjects covered: 

agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food and related domains (e.g. environment)

Related vocabularies: 

NAL

Mappinigs to other vocabularies: 

multiple vocabularies, see note below and http://www4.fao.org/agrovoc/default.htm

Vocabulary characteristics
Type of display : 
Alphabetical list
Web linked terms
Concept map diagram
Permuted, tab delimited
Other
Relationship types: 
Equivalence (Primary/variant terms or Preferred/non-preferred)
Hierarchical (Broader/narrower terms)
Associative (Related terms)
Ontological (Relationship and relationship type declared)
Number of classes: 

16 subject domains

Number of preferred terms: 
16,607
Number of Non-Preferred terms: 
10,758
Characteristics Comments: 

available also via webservice
Mapping:  One of the simplest ways to allow data exchange between systems that use different terminologies is to map those terminologies: mapping is a technique with which a correspondence between two entities can be identified. For example, the agricultural keyword “Food policies” from the AGROVOC Thesaurus corresponds to the keyword “food policy” from the National Agricultural Library (NAL) Thesaurus.
By doing so, searches into the Agris catalogue (http://www.fao.org/agris/) could be realized using also the terminology from the NAL Thesaurus, and not only the AGROVOC Thesaurus which was used in the system.
 
Similarly, searches into catalogues such as AGRICOLA (http://agricola.nal.usda.gov/), AgNIC (http://www.agnic.org/), FSRIO (http://fsrio.nal.usda.gov/) and NALDR (http://naldr.nal.usda.gov/) could be realized using the also the AGROVOC Thesaurus, and not only the NAL Thesaurus.
see also http://aims.fao.org/en/faq
 

Terms and Conditions
Availability: 
AGROVOC is free of charge for educational or other strictly non-commercial purposes. Downloading is authorized without any prior written permission from the copyright holders provided the source is fully acknowledged.
Comments, Availability: 

Contact varies with language. see http://www4.fao.org/agrovoc/default.htm

Provider
Vocabulary provider name: 
FAO
Provider URL: 

http://www.fao.org/

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