AGROVOC
Encyclopedia
AGROVOC was first developed in the 1980s as a multilingual structured thesaurus
for all subject fields in agriculture
, forestry
, fisheries, food and related domains (e.g. environment). Its main purpose was to standardize the indexing process for the AGRIS
database in order to make searching simpler and more efficient, and to guide the user to the most relevant resources. In the last 10 years, use of AGROVOC has considerably expanded to the point where it is now a tool for organization of explicit knowledge and development of ontologies and multilingual search functionality. AGROVOC has been transformed into a concept server as well as a term-based thesaurus.
AGROVOC is used all over the world by researchers, librarians, information managers, and others, for indexing, retrieving, and organizing data in agricultural information systems. Its role is to help standardize the semantic description of information objects in order to achieve information integration across systems, and to provide access to relevant resources.
Recently, AGROVOC has been transformed into a concept scheme, containing close to 40,000 concepts (represented by more than 580,000 terms) in 20 languages, and covering subject fields in agriculture, forestry and fisheries together with cross-cutting themes such as land use, rural livelihoods and food security.
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: Atmosphere
RT: Greenhouse effect
These relationships build the 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.
There are three levels of representation:
The abstract concepts build the actual structure of the concept scheme. A concept is represented by all the terms, preferred and non-preferred, in all languages, to which it is associated. The entire representation of a concept often includes many terms. Both concepts and terms participate in relationships with other concepts and terms:
1.- Inter-level relationships:
2.- Intra-level relationships:
The VocBench is accessible freely to everyone and facilitates collaborative editing. It serves as a pool of agricultural concepts and is a starting point for the development of specific domain ontologies, where multilingualism and localized representation of information are important aspects.
The web services are hosted on Apache Axis running on Tomcat. They are invoked via standard SOAP calls, returning a standard SOAP response. Using web services, changes on the AGROVOC Concept Server can be accessed immediately, reducing the time and effort necessary to download and incorporate the latest version of the AGROVOC Concept Server data into applications.
MySQL, MS Access, RDF, OWL, SKOS, Postgres, TagText, XML, and ISO2709.
Thesaurus
A thesaurus is a reference work that lists words grouped together according to similarity of meaning , in contrast to a dictionary, which contains definitions and pronunciations...
for all subject fields in agriculture
Agriculture
Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...
, forestry
Forestry
Forestry is the interdisciplinary profession embracing the science, art, and craft of creating, managing, using, and conserving forests and associated resources in a sustainable manner to meet desired goals, needs, and values for human benefit. Forestry is practiced in plantations and natural stands...
, fisheries, food and related domains (e.g. environment). Its main purpose was to standardize the indexing process for the AGRIS
AGRIS
AGRIS is a global public domain Database with 2.6 million structured bibliographical records on agricultural science and technology. The Database is maintained by FAO, and its content is provided by more than 150 participating institutions from 65 countries...
database in order to make searching simpler and more efficient, and to guide the user to the most relevant resources. In the last 10 years, use of AGROVOC has considerably expanded to the point where it is now a tool for organization of explicit knowledge and development of ontologies and multilingual search functionality. AGROVOC has been transformed into a concept server as well as a term-based thesaurus.
AGROVOC is used all over the world by researchers, librarians, information managers, and others, for indexing, retrieving, and organizing data in agricultural information systems. Its role is to help standardize the semantic description of information objects in order to achieve information integration across systems, and to provide access to relevant resources.
Recently, AGROVOC has been transformed into a concept scheme, containing close to 40,000 concepts (represented by more than 580,000 terms) in 20 languages, and covering subject fields in agriculture, forestry and fisheries together with cross-cutting themes such as land use, rural livelihoods and food security.
Structure of AGROVOC Thesaurus
The traditional AGROVOC Thesaurus 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). Scope notes and definitions are used in AGROVOC to clarify the meaning and the context of terms.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: Atmosphere
RT: Greenhouse effect
These relationships build the 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.
The AGROVOC Concept Scheme
AGROVOC has been converted from a term-based knowledge organization system with traditional thesaurus relationships (BT, NT, RT, and UF) to a concept-based system, the AGROVOC Concept Scheme (CS). 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.There are three levels of representation:
- concepts (the abstract meaning), for example ‘maize’ in the sense of a cereal;
- terms (language-specific lexical forms), for example ‘maize’, ‘maïs’, ‘玉米’, ‘ข้าวโพด’, or ‘corn’;
- term variants (the range of forms that can occur for each term such as spelling variants, singular, plural, abbreviations), for example ‘organization’ or ‘organisation’, ‘cow’ or ‘cows’, ‘Zea mays’ or ‘Z. mays’.
The abstract concepts build the actual structure of the concept scheme. A concept is represented by all the terms, preferred and non-preferred, in all languages, to which it is associated. The entire representation of a concept often includes many terms. Both concepts and terms participate in relationships with other concepts and terms:
1.- Inter-level relationships:
- Concept-to-Term: has_lexicalization (links concepts to their lexical realizations), for example the concept 'rice' links to its language-dependent terms ‘rice’, ‘riz’, ‘arroz’, ‘paddy’, as in: (concept) rice has_lexicalization (English term) rice.
- Term-to-String: has_acronym, has_spelling_variant, has_abbreviation (links language-dependent terms to their variants); for example: African Union has_acronym AU.
2.- Intra-level relationships:
- Concept-to-Concept: Relationships between concepts relate two different ideas, such as has_subconcept, e.g.: cereals has_subconcept maize, or is_used_to_make relationship, for example: maize is_used_to_make corn flour
- Term-to-Term: Relationships between terms relate two terms that belong to the same concept, such as the has_synonym relationship: maize has_synonym corn, or the has_scientific_name relationship, e.g.: beetles has_scientific_name Coleoptera.
The VocBench
The VocBench is a web-based working environment for managing the AGROVOC Concept Scheme. It is a tool that supports the maintenance of the Concept Scheme data by allowing users to add, edit, and delete terms and concepts, and create relationships between them in a distributed and collaborative environment. The VocBench includes administration and group management features as well as built-in workflows for maintenance, validation, export, and quality assurance (e.g. consistency check) of the data pool.The VocBench is accessible freely to everyone and facilitates collaborative editing. It serves as a pool of agricultural concepts and is a starting point for the development of specific domain ontologies, where multilingualism and localized representation of information are important aspects.
AGROVOC Web services
AGROVOC is accessible via web services, which can be called from any client application.The web services are hosted on Apache Axis running on Tomcat. They are invoked via standard SOAP calls, returning a standard SOAP response. Using web services, changes on the AGROVOC Concept Server can be accessed immediately, reducing the time and effort necessary to download and incorporate the latest version of the AGROVOC Concept Server data into applications.
Formats
AGROVOC can be downloaded freely for non-commercial use. It is available inMySQL, MS Access, RDF, OWL, SKOS, Postgres, TagText, XML, and ISO2709.
Related links
- Agricultural Information Management StandardsAgricultural Information Management StandardsThe Agricultural Information Management Standards, abbreviated to AIMS, is a web portal managed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations . It disseminates standards and good practices in information management for the support of the right to food, sustainable agriculture and...
- AGRISAGRISAGRIS is a global public domain Database with 2.6 million structured bibliographical records on agricultural science and technology. The Database is maintained by FAO, and its content is provided by more than 150 participating institutions from 65 countries...
- Agricultural Metadata Element SetAgMESThe AgMES initiative was developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and aims to encompass issues of semantic standards in the domain of agriculture with respect to description, resource discovery, interoperability and data exchange for different types of information...
- Geopolitical ontologyGeopolitical ontologyA geopolitical ontology is a mechanism to describe, manage and exchange data related to geopolitical entities such as countries, territories, regions and other similar areas.-Definitions and examples:...