The AGROVOC group of AIMS wrote the article 'Multilinguality in AGROVOC Concept Scheme: Challenges and Experiences' in collaboration with MIMOS Berhardin Malaysia, the National Institute of Plant Health Management (NIPHM) in India and Kasetsart Universityin Thailand. This publication can be found in the FAO Corporate Document Repository: http://www.fao.org/docrep/article/am813e.pdf

Abstract

AGROVOC plays a significant role in setting the standards as a common data model for representing and linking multilingual information from Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries, Food and other related domains resources unequivocally.



Researchers, librarians, terminologist and information managers from international organizations leverage on AGROVOC as the controlled vocabulary  to access, translate and share their knowledge collaboratively.



Since 1982, AGROVOC has evolved from a traditional thesaurus to an ontology based OWL model and finally to a SKOSXL model. Based on the model, FAO built a web based vocabulary management tool called “VocBench” which can handle the multilinguality concurrently.



This paper outlines the challenges of multilinguality in AGROVOC Concept Scheme, as well as the experiences and processes of converting multilingual information from heterogeneous data  formats into the AGROVOC Knowledge Base.