The FAO AIMS team presented usages and the power of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) in the ISKO UK biennial conference "Knowledge Organization – Making a difference" that took place on the 13th and 14th of July 2015 in London.

The ISKO conference illustrated the continuing demand for knowledge organization (KO). It aimed to "showcase R & D that offer benefits for cultural activities and economic development, and an opportunity to consider the impact that KO has had, is having and will have".

The presentation of the AIMS team introduced the AGRIS platform, the AGROVOC thesaurus together with the GACS project and the VocBench maintenance tool. It showed how AGROVOC enriches the AGRIS web application enabling new functionalities and how it can be easily maintained with the VocBench tool.

AGRIS can be described in three different dimensions: as a collaborative network, a multilingual bibliografic RDF database and a web portal to retrieve bibliografic information. It uses KOS as a backbone for linking information and more specifically it uses the AGROVOC thesaurus to 1. exploit the links between AGROVOC and other thesauri and 2. query external Web Services using AGROVOC terms/concepts. Furthermore AGROVOC enables a multilingual search on the AGRIS web portal which means that any user's query can be expanded to match results in all languages available in AGROVOC. AGROVOC itself includes 32,000+ concepts in up to 22 languages. The thesaurus is maintained by VocBench, an open source tool that allows collaborative editing of multilingual KOS and that supports RDF. 

Find the full presentation here