AGROVOC is a multilingual structured thesaurus of all subject fields in Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries, Food security and related domains (e.g. Sustainable Development, Nutrition, etc). It consists of words or expressions (terms), in different languages and organized in relationships (e.g. "broader", "narrower", and "related"), used to identify or search resources. Its main role is to standardize the indexing process in order to make searching simpler and more efficient, and to provide users with the most relevant resources.

The AGROVOC Thesaurus was developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Commission of the European Communities, in the early 1980s. It is updated by FAO roughly every three months and users can see the specific changes on the AGROVOC website.

AGROVOC is available in the five official languages at FAO, which are English, French, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic. It is also available in Czech, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Slovak and Thai. Other languages such as Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Korean and Persian are currently either being translated or revised.

Structure of AGROVOC

AGROVOC is made up of terms, which consist of one or more words representing always one and the same concept. For each term, a word block is displayed, showing the hierarchical and non-hierarchical relations to other terms: BT (broader term), NT (narrower term), RT (related term), UF (non-descriptor).

 Pollution
  NT: Acid deposition
  NT: Air pollution
  NT: Nonpoint pollution
  NT: Sediment pollution
  NT: Water pollution 
  RT: Environmental degradation  
  RT: Pollutants  
  RT: Pesticides  

  Air pollution
   BT: Pollution 
   RT: Atmostphere
   RT: Greenhouse effect

These relationships provide the scope and structure for the AGROVOC thesaurus. For instance, knowing that a broader term for "Air pollution" is "Pollution" and that related terms are "Atmosphere" and "Greenhouse effect " defines the scope of information represented by these terms. Additional scope notes are used in AGROVOC to clarify the meaning and the context of terms when necessary. Taxonomic and geographical terms are tagged for easy searching, filtering and downloading.

Formats

AGROVOC can be downloaded freely for non-commercial use. It is available in MySQL, Microsoft Access, TagText, ISO2709, XML, SKOS and OWL formats.

AGROVOC Web services

AGROVOC web services have recently gone online as part of the initiative to encourage developers of agricultural information management systems to incorporate AGROVOC into their applications via web services, instead of using local copies of the database. With web services, updates to the thesaurus are immediately available, reducing the time and effort necessary to regularly download and incorporate the latest version of the thesaurus into applications.

Currently, 7 web services to access the vocabulary are available online:

• retrieve the numeric termcode of a concept;
• retrieve the label of a concept matching the specified termcode in one of the available languages;
• retrieve all the labels of a term matching the specified termcode in all of the available languages;
• retrieve all terms that contain the search term.
• retrieve termcode, labels, synonyms, broader, narrower and related terms of the search term;
• retrieve the definitions, history or scope notes of a term; and
• retrieve an extended search query with all synonyms of the search term (for use in search applications);

AGROVOC web services rely on existing standard open source technologies like SOAP and WSDL.

From Thesauri to Ontologies

AGROVOC is the foundation that underpins the development of the Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) project. Using the knowledge contained in vocabulary systems and thesauri such as AGROVOC, the AOS will be able to develop specialized domain-specific terminologies and concepts that will better support information management in the web environment. A key objective is to add more semantics to the thesaurus, for example, by expanding and better specifying the relationships between concepts.

For example, at present the term "pollution" is formally associated with the term "pollutants" using the Related term (RT) relationship. In practice, when describing the type of association, we may be able to indicate explicitly that "pollutants" cause "pollution", thus making the relationship more meaningful than simply portraying them as Related Terms (RT).

 Pollution
    caused by: Pollutants  

Users requesting information about the term "pollution" would be presented with the option to limit their search to particular kind(s) of relationships, e.g. "Would you like to see all the causes of pollution?" The prospect for retrieval of more relevant resources is greatly increased.

An extended set of relationships can be used to perform more granular and more consistent indexing, and to provide users with more effective searching and browsing capabilities. The AOS aims to be a step towards this direction.

See also

• Join the AGROVOC Discussion List

Related Links

• Agricultural Information Management Standards
• Agricultural Ontology Service
• Agricultural Metadata Element Set
• Agricultural Information and Knowledge Management Papers
• RSS feed of news and events

External links

• AGROVOC Webservices
• Agricultural Information Management Standards Website