The AGROVOC Concept Scheme – A Walkthrough

Abstract

The Food and Agriculture Organization is developing a concept based multilingual vocabulary management tool to manage thesauri, authority lists and glossaries expressed as concept schemes ready to be used in a linked data environment.In this paper, we described the evolution of the AGROVOC thesaurus to AGROVOC Concept Scheme based on OWL (web ontology language) model and now shifting to SKOS (simple knowledge organization system) model. The paper explained why and how it evolved highlighting the key differences between different models. The system architecture and significant set of features available in the VocBench was discussed in the paper.

Indicators of global sustainable sourcing as a set covering problem: an integrated approach to sustainability

“…Some of the initiatives had indicator databases associated with them while others had to be parsed from indicator lists, tables, and document text. We recorded links for each indicator to one or more issues as discussed in the source documents, then standardized the resulting issue–indicator linkage network by cross‐walking the multisource terms to a standard vocabulary based on AGROVOC (Rajbhandari and Keizer 2012) and Library of Congress lists of terms. An example of these linkages is indicator 7 (population using unimproved water source), linked to five issues (access to clean water, basic needs, water infrastructure, public health, and water quality) under the impact framework, while under the vulnerability framework, there are eight linkages (access to clean water, basic needs, water infrastructure, public health, access to sanitation, health care infrastructure, public health initiatives, and water quality).…”

Semantic Description of Plant Phenological Development Stages, Starting with Grapevine

“…AGROVOC thesaurus is published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) [ 22 ]. It is edited by a worlwide community of experts and covers all FAO’s areas of interest, including agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food and related domains.…”

Semantic annotation of the CEREALAB database by the AGROVOC linked dataset

“…AGROVOC Concept Scheme (Rajbhandari and Keizer, 2012) is a semantically richer version of AGROVOC, which in addition to "terms" also uses the notion of "concept", and a larger set of relations between concepts. A concept is represented by all the terms in all languages, to which it is associated; both concepts and terms participate in relationships with other concepts and terms.…”

“…In (Laporte et al, 2012) is presented Thesauform†Traits, a web based tool dedicated to the collaborative construction of a thesaurus by experts in the field of plant functional diversity research; the authors stated that such a thesaurus will serve as a stable reference of standards for integration purposes, specifically when published in RDF language and in addition available as linked data on the web. VocBench 26 is a web-based multilingual working environment for managing the AGROVOC thesaurus; this tool has been used to transform AGROVOC and other thesauri, authority lists and glossaries into SKOS concept schemes (Rajbhandari and Keizer, 2012). It facilitates as a collaborative tool allowing experts to manage multilingual terminology and semantic concept; moreover, it provides a workflow for the maintenance, validation, and consistency check.…”