We are pleased to announce the new AGROVOC release - January 2016. The new release is available in the following ways:

• for search & browse
• for download
• through web services
• through the SPARQL endpoint

The VocBench Sandbox will be udpated in the coming days. 

What is new?

*Content*

- New concepts and English terms, plus definitions (e.g., resilience agricultural, mechanization labour, saving technology, conservation agriculture, biostimulants - also added in French, Spanish, Italian, German).  

- Moldovian: about 450 new terms, plus scope notes.   

- Turkish: eight new concepts and definitions.  

- Czech: added translation of 13 terms. 

- Ukrainian: translation of 59 terms were added.  

- New terms and concepts in the area of "land tenure": about 60 new terms in French and Spanish, plus a few new concepts added in English. A dedicated subvocabulary to "land tenure" concepts have been added.     

- New content in the area of "Pathogenic fungi". Added 104 new species and genera of pathogenic fungi, and 45 new species and genera of useful plants affected by the revised pathogenic fungi (property IsPathogenOf). All new concepts entered are given their taxonomic rank (mostly species and genus), and a total of existing 1500 taxonomic species related to "fungi" have been revised in their rank. Many common names added in English and German. All new common names and scientific names have been tagged as "Common name for fungi", "Common name for plants", "Taxonomic terms for fungi", "Taxonomic terms for plants".  

- Revision of the terms related by the property "hasSpellingVariant". A definition was provided for this property. 

- Removed a few duplicated scope notes.

*Mappings*

- Added mapping to the Thesaurus of Cacao. 

- Fixed the URIs of the concepts from the Chinese Agricultural Thesaurus.

- Removed a few wrong mappings.

*RDF, SKOS, agrontology*

- Local names pattern of images and definitions changed from "c_img" and "c_def" to "img_" and "def_" respectively.

- The agrontology property "hasTaxonomicLevel" replaced with the property "hasTaxonomicRank".

- Revised treatment of common and scientific names for plants and animal, with the introduction of a dedicated language tag for scientific names: "zxx" (from ISO 639)

- Revised treatment of definitions, using dct:source instead of vocbench:hasLink for the URL of the definition source. 

Credits

Our warm thanks to all AGROVOC editors who contributed to this new release. In particular, the following groups and individuals have contributed new concepts and terms to AGROVOC: Viorica Lupu from the Republican Scientific Agricultural Library, State Agrarian University of Moldova (Moldova); Tatiana Deribon from the Ukrainian Institute of SciTech& Econ Information (Urkain), Yasemin Çevik from the Turkish National AGRIS Center (Turkey); Esther Mietzsch and her team from KTBL, the Kuratorium für Technik und Bauwesen in der Landwirtschaft e.V. in Germany; Luciana Zedda of ZB MED - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Lebenswissenschaften (Germany); Massimo Ragucci, Carla Spigarelli and their colleagues from the Italian Ministero delle Politiche Agricole (Italy); Nedaa Amraish from FAO (Arabic); Jana Skokanova from Uzei, the Czech Institute of Agricultural Economics and information (Czech republic); Yehismi Lorena Perdomo Villamil from CORPOICO (Colombia); Magnus Grille and Christopher Muenke from FAO (topics on forestry); Nedaa Amraish from the Technologies and Practices for Small Agricultural Producers (TECA) team from FAO; Laura Meggiolario, Gérard Ciparisse, Vittoria Ruggiero from the Land Tenure Portal Team from GFAR; Rachele Oriente from the FAO Document Repository team; the FAO Animal Production and Health Division.

A special thank to the whole AGROVOC team, past and present: Sarah Dister, Karna Wegner, marie-Angélique Laporte, Sachit Rajbhandari (FAO), Armando Stellato, Andrea Turbati and all the ART Team at the University of Tor Vergata, Rome, and to Johannes Keizer, leader of the AIMS group. Also a warm thanks to all those who have contributed to this work in different ways and made this release possible: Fabrizio Celli, Mauro Ranchicchio, Valeria Pesce, Thembani Malapela from FAO; Arun Anand Sadanandan and Dickson Lukose from MIMOS Berhad; Thomas Baker and Osma Souminen from the GACS working group.  

Last, but by no means least, thanks to all AGROVOC users! 

To the AGROVOC editors: Vocbench is again available for editing.