The Steering Group of the GACS (Global Agricultural Concept Scheme) project has approved the final results of Phase One.

Version 1.0 of the Status Quo and Integration Proposal reports are now accessible, see attachments at the bottom of this post.

About GACS

The idea for GACS emerged out of discussions at the World Congress of IAALD, the International Association of Agricultural Information Specialists, in July 2013. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), CAB International (CABI), and the National Agricultural Library of the USA (NAL) agreed in October 2013 to explore the feasibility of developing a shared concept scheme by integrating their three thesauri: the AGROVOC Concept Scheme, the CAB Thesaurus (CABT), and NAL Thesaurus (NALT).

The goal of the GACS project is to create a Global Agricultural Concept Scheme as a hub for thesauri in the agricultural field, in multiple languages, for use in Linked Data.

GACS in three phases

The GACS project foresees three phases:

Phase One: Feasibility Study (concluded).
The publication of a paper on the status quo of each thesaurus and a report on how to integrate the three thesauri into a Global Agricultural Concept Scheme (both accessible from this post).

Phase Two: GACS Beta
The creation and refinement of a new concept scheme mapped to and from a selection of circa 10,000 frequently used concepts from AGROVOC, CABT, and NALT.

Phase Three: GACS 1.0 and beyond
If resources are available for building GACS into more than the circa 10,000 concepts of GACS Beta, the GACS editorial team will develop an integrated semantic super-structure for the concept scheme, collaborate with concept providers on naming things like species, viruses, and chemicals with Linked Data URIs, and extend the GACS partnership to additional organizations and partner thesauri.

Moving on to Phase Two!