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AGROVOC Linked Open Data

last update on Fri, 12/04/2013

Linked Data is a method of web publication in which each individual piece of data is:

  • uniquely identified using HTTP URIs (that is, URLs, or "web addresses"),
  • available both as "machine readable" data and as "human readable" pages, and
  • linked to other resources.

AGROVOC is now available as a linked data set published, aligned (linked) with several vocabularies. The Linked Data version of AGROVOC is in RDF/SKOS-XL, and is stored in Allegrograph triple store. Data is accessible to machines through a SPARQL endopoint, and to humans by means of a HTML pages generated with Pubby. Data is hosted by MIMOS Berhad (Malaysia), a FAO research partner.

Table 1 below provides some figures about the vocabularies to which AGROVOC is aligned:

Resource Topics Linked concepts Languages Linked Data Type of link
FAO Biotechnology Glossary Biotechnologies 810 EN, ES, FR, +3 more Yes skos:closeMatch
EUROVOC General EU 1 297 EN, ES, FR + 21 more Yes skos:exactMatch
GEMET Environment 1 191 EN, ES, FR + 30 more Yes skos:exactMatch
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) General 1 093 EN Yes skos:exactMatch
NAL Thesaurus Agriculture 13 390 EN, ES Yes skos:exactMatch
RAMEAU Répertoire d'autorité-matière encyclopedique et alphabetique unifie  General 686 FR Yes skos:exactMatch
STW - Thesaurus for Economics Economy 1 136 EN, DE Yes skos:exactMatch
TheSoz - Thesaurus for the Social Sciences Social sciences 846 EN, DE Yes skos:exactMatch
Geopolical Ontology Geopolitical entities 253 AR, CH, EN, ES, FR, RU Yes skos:exactMatch
Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) General 409 EN, ES, FR + 8 more Yes skos:exactMatch
DBpedia General 10 989 EN, ES, FR + 8 more Yes skos:exactMatch
skos:closeMatch
SWD (Schlagwortnormdatei) General 6 245 DE Yes skos:exactMatch
skos:closeMatch
skos:broadMatch
skos:narrowMatch
GeoNames Geographical entities 212 EN, ES, FR + 63 more Yes skos:exactMatch

Table 1. Some figures of vocabularies linked from AGROVOC (last updated on March 2013)

Candidate resources for future linking are: CAB Thesaurus, CAT, AgroXML, GBIF, ASFA, UMBEL and the Thesaurus Ethics in the Life Sciences.

A VoID description of the AGROVOC Linked Dataset is also available.  

Top Concepts of AGROVOC

For quick access to human readable Linked Data pages of AGROVOC use this list of top concepts (note that these same HTTP URIs will return RDF if requested in the accept HTTP header):

SPARQL Query Interface

AGROVOC is also accessible using SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language), an SQL-like query language typically used to extract RDF triples from triple-stores:

SPARQL query examples

Given the URI of a resource, for example http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_4039 discover the English preferred label and all the exact matches:

 
SELECT ?pl ?em {
        OPTIONAL { <http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_4039> skos:exactMatch ?em } .
        <http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_4039> skos:prefLabel ?pl .
        FILTER ( (lang(?pl)="en") )}
 
RESULT :
Pl                   em
"Japan"@e   <http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/resource/Japan>
"Japan"@en <http://eurovoc.europa.eu/1524>
"Japan"@en <http://lod.nal.usda.gov/nalt/35135>
"Japan"@en <http://zbw.eu/stw/descriptor/17568-3>
"Japan"@en <http://lod.gesis.org/thesoz/concept/10048140>
"Japan"@en <http://dewey.info/class/952/>
 
Given the English preferred label, for example Japan, discover the URI and all the exact matches:
 
 
SELECT ?uri ?em {
  ?uri skos:prefLabel "Japan"@en .
  OPTIONAL { <http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_4039> skos:exactMatch ?em } .
}
 
RESULT:
uri                                                                    em
<http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_4039> <http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geoinfo/geopolitical/resource/Japan>
<http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_4039> <http://eurovoc.europa.eu/1524>
<http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_4039> <http://lod.nal.usda.gov/nalt/35135>
<http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_4039> <http://zbw.eu/stw/descriptor/17568-3>
<http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_4039> <http://lod.gesis.org/thesoz/concept/10048140>
<http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_4039> <http://dewey.info/class/952/>

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