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