Good news for ASFA and AGROVOC users
...as ASFA and AGROVOC work together to share some infrastructure and enrich the controlled vocabularies
Did you know that the Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts (ASFA) database is cited by the majority of aquatic and marine science librarians as their primary database?
ASFA on one end
ASFA is the premier reference in the field of fisheries, aquatic and marine sciences.
Input to the ASFA bibliographic database is provided by a growing international network of information centers monitoring over 3,000 serial publications, in addition to books, reports, conference proceedings, translations and grey literature covering the science, technology and management of marine, brackishwater, and freshwater environments.
Although primarily in English, publications in over 40 other languages are translated, indexed and included in the database. Published since 1971, the ASFA database contains more than 2,500,000 records.
AGROVOC on the other
AGROVOC is a controlled vocabulary covering all areas of interest of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, including food, nutrition, agriculture, fisheries, forestry, environment etc.
It is published by FAO and edited by a community of experts. AGROVOC consists of 36,000+ concepts available in up to 33 languages. Currently, AGROVOC is an SKOS-XL concept scheme, and a Linked Open Data (LOD) set.
AGROVOC is widely used in specialized libraries as well as digital libraries and repositories to index content and for the purpose of text mining. It is also used as a specialized tagging resource for knowledge and content organization by FAO and other third-party stakeholders.
The collaboration..
ASFA will be working together with AGROVOC to share some infrastructure and enrich ASFA’s controlled vocabularies.
ASFA’s controlled vocabularies cover subject, taxonomic and geographic terms and are essential to providing high-level search options on the ASFA database.
Thanks to AGROVOC, the ASFA Thesaurus will soon become freely available, more accessible and more multilingual.
AGROVOC will also benefit from the wealth of knowledge in the ASFA thesaurus, so this will be a very interesting collaboration to support dissemination of information on fisheries and aquatic sciences to the world.
