Agricultural Information Institute (AII) of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) is a national nonprofit research institution. The mission of AII is to undertake agricultural information research and to provide agricultural sci-tech information services. It focuses on the research and innovation of agricultural information analysis, agricultural information technology and agricultural information management.



Chinese Agricultural Thesaurus (CAT) is the largest agricultural domain thesaurus in China, which is held and maintained by AII of CAAS. CAT was the important fruits of more than 100 professionals’ six years hard work. The international and national standards were adopted while designing and constructing CAT. CAT covers areas including agriculture, forestry, biology, etc. It is organized in 40 main categories and contains more than 63 thousands concepts and most of them have English translation. In addition, CAT includes more than 130 thousands semantic relationships such as Use, UF, BT, NT and RT.CAT is now available as a Linked Data set published. The Linked Data version of CAT is in RDF/SKOS-XL, and is stored in Virtuoso triple store. Data is accessible to machines through a SPARQL endopoint, and to humans by means of a HTML pages generated with Virtuoso. From 2005, AII cooperated with FAO, started the CAT to AGROVOC mapping work, conforming to the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) mapping rules (skos: exactMatch, broadMatch and narrowMatch were mainly considered and applied). In addition, CAT has also been mapped to EUROVOC, NALT, LCSH automatically just based on the label string exact match. These mapping results could lay fundamental bases for higher level interoperability (e.g. cross-lingual information retrieval and knowledge discovery applications).

AGROVOC is a controlled vocabulary covering all areas of interest of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. It 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 content organization by FAO and third-party stakeholders. AGROVOC is published monthly with the aim to improve the quality of the services for the agricultural community, AGROVOC is now engaging with expert communities that are contributing and benefiting of the AGROVOC services.