The Agrontology is a description vocabulary defined in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) providing a set of domain-specific properties for agri-food related concepts. It is maintained by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) as a living ontology, enriched and improved based on users' feedback.

The Agrontology adds a semantic layer to any agri-food vocabulary or dataset that needs to represent domain-specific relations between entities of any kind (concepts, classes) in the areas covered by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

(It is used for instance in the AGROVOC thesaurus to express domain-specific relations between concepts.)

The types of relationships that are covered are: process, causative, quantitative, spatial, taxonomic, partitive.

Examples of the semantics that the Agrontology can represent:

• Irrigation is a practice for flooded rice and influences soil salinization:
  
  “irrigation” (concept) “is practice for” (Agrontology property) “flooded rice” (concept)
  
  “irrigation” (concept) - “influences” (Agrontology property) - ”soil salinization” (concept)
• Rain causes lodging and lodging causes crop losses:
  
  “rain” (concept) “causes” (Agrontology property) “lodging” (concept)
  
  “lodging” (concept) “causes” (Agrontology property) “crop losses” (concept)

“These non-hierarchical relations express a notion of ‘relatedness’ between concepts. When applied correctly, these additional relationships provide more context and richness to the dataset" (source: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2020.105965).

Access

The URI of the Agrontology ontology is: http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrontology and its namespace is http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrontology#

A technical overview is available here.

Ownership and license

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is responsible for the maintenance of the Agrontology.

The Agrontology is distributed under a CC-BY-4.0 license.