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://aims.fao.org/website/AGROVOC-Thesaurus/sub or http://aims.fao.org/website/AGROVOC/sub/AGROVOC-Thesaurus/sub

Vocabulary Sample URL: 

http://aims.fao.org/agrovoc/page?c=12332

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

AGROVOC is available in the six official languages at FAO: English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Russian. It has also been translated into Czech, Persian, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lao, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, and Thai, and is being translated into other languages such as Malay, Moldavian, Telugu, Turkish, and Ukrainian.

Major subjects covered: 

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

Mappinigs to other vocabularies: 

AGROVOC is mapped to Eurovoc, NALT, GEMET, LCSH, and STW - Thesaurus for Economics. There are plans to map AGROVOC to CAB, CAT, AgroXML. GBIF, ASFA, FAO BioTechnology, and Thesaurus Ethics in the Life Sciences.

Vocabulary characteristics
Type of display : 
Alphabetical list
Web linked terms
Concept map diagram
Permuted, tab delimited
Other
Description of overall structure: 

"AGROVOC is expressed using a concept scheme. A concept scheme is similar to a traditional vocabulary model but more flexible, able to also handle taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and subject headers. The AGROVOC concept scheme is expressed in several formats including Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), a commonly used concept scheme that a wide variety of existing systems can interpret right out of the box."

Relationship types: 
Equivalence (Primary/variant terms or Preferred/non-preferred)
Hierarchical (Broader/narrower terms)
Associative (Related terms)
Ontological (Relationship and relationship type declared)
Characteristics Comments: 

"AGROVOC Linked Open Data (LOD) is a project to turn the AGROVOC thesaurus into a multilingual, terminological backbone for agricultural digital goods. Hosted by research partner MIMOS it provides web-accessible, structured data records on agricultural concepts and even more importantly, links those concepts to other online thesauri."

Terms and Conditions
Availability: 
AGROVOC may be downloaded in several formats (e.g. SKOS, OWL, MySQL, TagText, ISO 2709, XML, and Microsoft Access Database) 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: 

available also via webservice

Import/download instructions : 

See http://aims.fao.org/website/Download/sub

Provider
Vocabulary provider name: 
FAO
Provider URL: 

http://www.fao.org/

Provider contact details: 

"National organizations and institutes are welcome to help enrich and maintain AGROVOC's many languages by joining our growing community. Please contact us at http://aims.fao.org/contact "

Provider section comments: 

"The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations leads international efforts to defeat hunger. Serving both developed and developing countries, FAO acts as a neutral forum where all nations meet as equals to negotiate agreements and debate policy. FAO is also a source of knowledge and information. We help developing countries and countries in transition modernize and improve agriculture, forestry and fisheries practices and ensure good nutrition for all. Since our founding in 1945, we have focused special attention on developing rural areas, home to 70 percent of the world's poor and hungry people."

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