Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts (ASFA) was established in 1971 with the aim of disseminating aquatic sciences, fisheries and aquaculture research. Today, the partnership has grown to a network of over 100 institutions around the world who each contribute their research, skills and knowledge to the ASFA information system.

ASFA’s subject thesaurus is used for indexing bibliographic records on the ASFA database, which contains over 3.7 million records. The thesaurus covers all topics within ASFA’s subject scope, which is the science, technology, management, and conservation of marine, brackish water, and freshwater resources and environments, including their socio-economic and legal aspects.

A working group of 14 ASFA Partners is responsible for updating and maintaining the thesaurus. To make the most of each member’s skills, the working group has three subgroups focused on particular areas of managing the thesaurus: (1) Integration – ensuring the thesaurus is integrated on the ASFA database and other platforms; (2) Coverage – using members’ subject knowledge to update the coverage of specific topics, including food technology, marine resources and fisheries management; (3) VocBench editors – adding definitions and translations to concepts. Participation in AGROVOC has allowed Working Group members to contribute their skills and knowledge to improve the thesaurus, as well as learn from other communities of experts.

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.