The Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) is a multi-stakeholder initiative that accelerates the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in Digital Public Goods (DPGs). The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) joined the DPGA in May 2022, underscoring FAO’s commitment to the development and championing of digital public goods that will help achieve sustainable agrifood systems and contribute to the SDGs. 

Over the past year, the FAO has become a leader in the development and championing of DPGs, introducing four new DPGs nominated for certification and several noteworthy developments, including a new DPG-first approach to be launched in 2024. See the newly released “State of the Digital Public Goods Ecosystem 2023”.

Among the products nominated in 2023 is the AGROVOC Multilingual Thesaurus, which officially attained the status of DPG on 15 January 2024. AGROVOC is a thesaurus of 41,000+ agricultural concepts and relationships in up to 42 languages, available for public (human and machine) use to facilitate access and interoperability of data across institutions and languages. It is maintained by several institutions coordinated by FAO.

In the application for DPG status recognition, two aspects were especially highlighted:

• The relevance of AGROVOC with respect to the SDGs: it is widely recognized that consistent use of relevant concepts to index data and resources across repositories and institutions is essential for data exchange, aggregation, and comparison, and is therefore of great support to consistently monitor progress on the SDGs. Not only does AGROVOC cover all domains related to the SDGs for whose indicators FAO is custodian, but it also includes a dedicated concept for the SDGs and individual sub-concepts for each SDG, with official definitions. 
• The openness and standard compliance of the protocols and formats to access AGROVOC, in full adherence to the FAIR Data Principles and to Sir Tim Berners Lee’s Five Stars and Linked Data principles.

Learn how to make the most of AGROVOC: read more at https://www.fao.org/agrovoc/about and https://www.fao.org/agrovoc/publications, or register for the online course!