The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is set to host a webinar on 22 May at 14:00 CEST to demonstrate how to improve article findability with controlled vocabularies. FAO’s valuable multilingual controlled vocabulary, AGROVOC, will be used as a use case in this webinar, which will be held in English and titled “Enhancing Article Findability in Agricultural Sciences with AGROVOC Thesaurus.” 

Participants of this webinar will learn in-depth strategies for optimising the findability of data with controlled vocabularies, including:

• Gaining a comprehensive understanding of controlled vocabulary and its significance in organising and retrieving information in agricultural sciences;
• Becoming familiar with the AGROVOC thesaurus;
• Learning about the hierarchical structure of AGROVOC, including concepts, preferred terms, and relationships;
• Understanding how to leverage AGROVOC to improve the findability and visibility of articles in agricultural sciences;
• Acquiring knowledge of effective search strategies with AGROVOC;
• Learning best practices for integrating AGROVOC into their research workflow, ensuring consistency, accuracy, and interoperability in applying AGROVOC terms.

This is the first webinar in the series. Throughout the “Enhancing Article Findability in Agricultural Sciences with AGROVOC Thesaurus” series, each webinar will focus on a different area of discipline within FAO’s areas of interest, allowing for specific examples to be utilised throughout the webinar. The first webinar will focus on “forestry”.  

Research4Life recently integrated AGROVOC as a “reference source” in the Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA) collection. Therefore, this webinar will provide in-depth information about accessing and using AGROVOC and its impact on multilingual research for students, researchers, or professionals looking to take advantage of AGORA's extensive resources.

The webinar is intended for prospective and present users of the AGORA platform.

Interested participants can register for the webinar here: https://fao.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJErdeuhqz8pEtSh0v7c4xaF2psmUFJYdpqn 

To stay up to date on future AGORA events and training opportunities join the community here: https://dgroups.org/fao/agora. 

More about AGROVOC

AGROVOC is a multilingual and controlled vocabulary that covers concepts and terminology under FAO's areas of interest. It is a structured collection of concepts, terms, definitions and relationships. These concepts can represent anything related to food and agriculture, spanning from specific terms like "maize" to broader concepts like "hunger," "aquaculture," "value chains," or "forestry."  AGROVOC plays a crucial role in providing unambiguous identification of resources, standardising indexing processes, and enhancing the efficiency of search functions. Additionally, each concept in AGROVOC is associated with terms used to express it in multiple languages, known as lexicalisations. AGROVOC  has over 41,000 concepts and 994,000 terms available in up to 42 languages.

More about AGORA

Since 2003, FAO has led the AGORA collection, which provides access to thousands of journals, e-books, and other information resources covering agriculture, fisheries, food, nutrition, veterinary science and related biological, environmental and social sciences in public institutions worldwide.  The aim of the programme is to improve the quality and effectiveness of agricultural research, education and training in low-income countries.

Subscription-based journals and major scientific books remain important sources of high-quality scientific information that are crucial in advancing higher education, improving the ability to share findings, and informing about public policy decisions. AGORA is one of the five programmes that make up Research4Life.