AGROVOC
AGROVOC (an artificial word from agriculture and vocabulary) is a multilingual, controlled vocabulary that covers all areas of interest of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). These include the areas of food, nutrition, agriculture, fisheries, forestry and the environment. The vocabulary consists of more than 32,000 terms (English: Concepts) with up to 40,000 terms (English: Terms) in different languages. AGROVOC is based on the work of a community of experts and is coordinated by the FAO. AGROVOC is made available by the FAO as an RDF / SKOS -XL concept scheme and published as a linked data set, which has been adapted to 16 additional vocabularies.
history
AGROVOC was first published in English, Spanish and French by the FAO in the early 1980s. It should serve as a controlled vocabulary to index publications in agricultural science and engineering. AGROVOC was developed especially for the AGRIS bibliographic database. In the 1990s, AGROVOC was digitized in a relational database. In 2004 the first attempts to define AGROVOC with the help of a Web Ontology Language (OWL) began. At the same time, an internet-based editing tool was developed which was then called WorkBench and is now called VocBench. AGROVOC has been based on SKOS since 2009. Today AGROVOC is available as a SKOS-XL concept diagram in various languages and was published as a Linked Open Data (LOD) set. AGROVOC has been adapted to 16 additional vocabularies.
Users
AGROVOC is used by researchers, librarians and information managers for indexing, retrieving and organizing data in agricultural information systems and websites. In the context of the Semantic Web , new user groups are also emerging, such as software developers and ontology specialists.
maintenance
The AGROVOC team, which is stationed at the FAO headquarters, coordinates the editorial work of AGROVOC. The actual maintenance is done by a community of editors and institutions for each of the language versions.
The community uses VocBench as a processing tool for AGROVOC. VocBench was specially developed for the special features of the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data environments and has specific functions that simplify collaborative collaboration, multilingualism, administration and group management. These functions allow flexible assignment of roles for maintenance, validation and quality assurance.
The FAO is also responsible for the maintenance of AGROVOC, which includes publishing it as a LOD set. Technical support comes from the University of Tor Vergata (Rome, Italy), which also leads the technical development of VocBench.
structure
All 32,000+ terms in the AGROVOC thesaurus are organized hierarchically under 25 main concepts. AGROVOC main concepts are general and superordinate concepts such as "Activities", "Organisms", "Places", "Products" etc. More than half of the total number of concepts (20,000+) fall under the main concept "Organism", which is the strong focus from AGROVOC to the agricultural sector. Since AGROVOC is an RDF / SKOS-XL scheme, the conceptual level and the terminological level are separated from each other. Basic terms for this type of scheme are: concepts, terms and relations.
- Terms
Everything that is presented in AGROVOC is based on concepts. Terms are represented by designations. A term can also be called a collection of all terms (in the different languages) that describe the term itself. In SKOS, terms are defined as skos: Concept and identified by a dereferenceable URI (= URL). For example, the AGROVOC term with the URI aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_12332 stands for maize.
- Designations
Names are the natural ones to name a term. For example, "maize," "maïs," "玉米", and "ข้าวโพด" are all terms that refer to the same term in English, French, Chinese, and Hindi. Designations in AGROVOC are expressed using SKOS extensions for labels - SKOS-XL. The predicates used are: skosxl: preflabel (for preferred names) and skosxl: altlabel (for alternative names).
- Relations
In SKOS hierarchical relations between concepts are expressed with the predicates skos: broader and skos: narrower. These refer to the classic thesaurus relations broader / narrower (broader / narrower), BT / NT. Non-hierarchical relations express a relationship between the concepts. AGROVOC uses, on the one hand, the SKOS relation skos: related (according to the classic thesaurus: RT) and, on the other hand, a specific vocabulary for relations, which is called Agrontology.
With the help of the SKOS-XL extension from SKOS, AGROVOC also allows relationships between labels (e.g. terms).
Linked data
AGROVOC is available as a linked data set and adapted to 16 other vocabularies from the field of agricultural science (see table below). The linked data version of AGROVOC was published as RDF and HTML through a content negotiation mechanism. Access is also available via a SPARQL endpoint. The advantage of a thesaurus like AGROVOC, which is available in a LOD version, is the automatic linking of the indexed resources as soon as the thesaurus itself has been linked. A good example of this is AGRIS, a mash-up web application that connects the bibliographic AGRIS repository (which is indexed using AGROVOC) with related web resources (the web resources are in turn indexed with AGROVOC vocabulary).
| resource | theme | Related concepts | languages | Linked data | Type d. Left |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ASFA | fishing | 1784 | skos: closeMatch | ||
| FAO Biotechnology Glossary | Biotechnologies | 810 | EN, ES, FR, +3 more | Yes | skos: closeMatch |
| Chinese Agriculture Thesaurus (CAT) | agricultural economics | Yes | skos: closeMatch | ||
| EARTh | environment | 1363 | EN + | Yes | skos: closeMatch |
| EUROVOC | General EU | 1297 | EN, ES, FR, +21 more | Yes | skos: exactMatch |
| GEMET | environment | 1191 | EN, ES, FR, +30 more | Yes | skos: exactMatch |
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) | General | 1093 | EN | Yes | skos: exactMatch |
| NAL thesaurus | agricultural economics | 13390 | EN, ES | Yes | skos: exactMatch |
| RAMEAU Répertoire d'autorité-matière encyclopedique et alphabetique unifie | General | 686 | FR | Yes | skos: exactMatch |
| STW - Thesaurus for Economics | Economy | 1136 | THE END | Yes | skos: exactMatch |
| TheSoz - Thesaurus for the Social Sciences | Social sciences | 846 | THE END | Yes | skos: exactMatch |
| Geopolitical Ontology | Geopolitical entities | 253 | AR, CH, EN, ES, FR, RU | Yes | skos: exactMatch |
| Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) | General | 409 | EN, ES, FR +8 more | Yes | skos: exactMatch |
| DBpedia | General | 10989 | EN, ES, FR +8 more | Yes | skos: exactMatch |
| SWD (keyword authority file) | General | 6245 | DE | Yes | skos: exactMatch skos: closeMatch skos: broadMatch skos: narrowMatch |
| GeoNames | Geographic entities | 212 | EN, ES, FR +63 more | Yes | skos: exactMatch |
Copyright and Licenses
The copyright of the AGROVOC versions in English, French, Russian and Spanish is subject to the FAO and is licensed with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. The copyright of all other languages is subject to the institutions that are responsible for the respective language versions.
literature
Individual evidence
- ↑ AGROVOC Uses ( Memento from May 5, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ AGROVOC people
- ↑ Tor Vegata University
- ↑ Agrontology
- ↑ Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported