Dear all,

The latest release of AGROVOC, March 2015, is out!
It can be accessed in the following ways:

• for search and download from our website
• through web services
• through the SPARQL endpoint
• through the VocBench Sandbox

What is new?

• The capitalization of English terms has been completely revised to follow current standards for thesauri. Now, English terms are consistently written out in lower case, with the following notable exceptions: proper names and geographic names (start with upper-case); abbreviations (all upper-case); chemical symbols and compounds (follow conventions valid in the chemical domain), scientific names for plants, animals, fungi, viruses and bacteria.
• The use of umlauts in German has been revised, so that we now have the forms with and without umlaut whenever this is appropriate. We also started a complete revision of the use of capital letters in German, in order to conform to standard conventions for German.
• In the Italian version a few erroneous empty labels have been removed.
• In the Arabic version, spelling variants have been revised.
• More than 100 new concepts related to land tenure have been added in up to three languages (English, French and Spanish). Other domains that have been enriched are “good practices” and “technologies and practices for small agricultural producers”.
• New terms have been added to various language versions: English (137 terms), French (124 terms), Turkish (108 terms), Spanish (107 terms), Ukrainian (100+ tems), Czech (57 terms), German (26 terms), Arabic (5 terms), Telugu (4 terms) and Portuguese (1 term).
• Agrontology, the RDF vocabulary used to express specific information in AGROVOC, has also been revised. Changes were applied in the domain of scientific taxonomies (properties removed for the sake of simplicity). Now, taxonomic hierarchies are consistently expressed using skos:narrow / skos:broader.

Credits

The following groups and individuals have contributed new concepts and terms to AGROVOC, each in their own area of expertise: the Land Portal team (Laura Meggiolaro, Gèrard Ciparisse, Vittoria Ruggiero); FAO’s Good Practices team; FAO’s Agricultural Technologies and Practices (TECA) Platform and the Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Agrícolas (INCA); Esther Mietzch and her team from the Kuratorium für Technik und Bauwesen in der Landwirtschaft (KTBL) (German); Luciana Zedda of ZB MED - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Lebenswissenschaften (German); Tatiana Deribon from the Ukrainian Institute of SciTech& Econ Information (Ukranian); Yasemin Çevik from the Turkish National AGRIS Center (Turkish); Otakar Cerba from the University of West Bohemia (Czech); Nedaa Amraish from FAO’s Technologies and Practices for Small Agricultural Producers (TECA) platform (Arabic); Jana Skokanova from Uzei, the Czech Institute of Agricultural Economics and information (Czech); Magnus Grille and Christopher Muenke from the FAO Forestry division.

A special thanks to the AGROVOC and VocBench teams: Caterina Caracciolo, Sarah Dister, Sachit Rajbhandari, Lavanya Kiran, Marie-Angelique Laporte; and Armando Stellato, Andrea Turbati and the whole ART Team at the University of Tor Vergata, Rome. A special thanks 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!

The AGROVOC team