As part of the CGIAR’s Ontologies Community of Practice fourth webinar series: All about our products and their uses, the webinar 'Strengthening AGROVOC through engagement with expert communities' is set to take place on Tuesday 2 June 2020 at 3:00 PM CEST (UTC + 02:00).

Register here. Advanced registration is required in order to attend the webinar.

During this webinar, the AGROVOC Team from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations will introduce how to keep AGROVOC up to date with a number of institutions and individual domain experts serving as focal points for specific languages and topics. 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. 

AGROVOC is edited through the web-based platform VocBench 3, an advanced collaboration environment for maintaining thesauri, ontologies, code lists and authority resources, providing features such as history, validation, a publication workflow, and multi-user management with role-based access control. Specialized concept schemes are now possible within AGROVOC. VocBench 3 supports the use of hierarchical relation properties that are specific to a scheme. The multischeme hierarchy approach means that a controlled vocabulary can be viewed flexibly and edited with its customized relations, or exported with a generic SKOS hierarchy of broader and narrower relations, without changing the hierarchy of AGROVOC itself. 

This opens for interesting potential collaborations with specialized communities; their vocabulary could be hosted by AGROVOC and would enrich AGROVOC, while maintaining the possibility for separate hierarchy, exports and display.

More about AGROVOC

AGROVOC is the largest Linked Open Data set about agriculture available for public use and facilitates access and visibility of data across domains and languages. It offers a structured collection of agricultural concepts, terms, definitions and relationships which are used to unambiguously identify resources, allowing standardized indexing processes and making searches more efficient.

AGROVOC uses semantic web technologies, linking to other multilingual knowledge organization systems and building bridges between datasets. The data set is widely used in specialized as well as digital libraries and repositories for indexing content and text mining, and serves as a specialized tagging resource for content organization by FAO and third-party stakeholders.