We are pleased to announce a new feature available in the AGRIS Web site (http://agris.fao.org/ ): the multilingual search. The final goal is to allow users to query the AGRIS database in their own native language, retrieving also results in different languages. This is an optional feature (not enabled by default) and it is not available in the “classical search”.

But let’s describe the core scenario… Xian is a Chinese researcher and he wants to discover something in the AGRIS database. He knows that the Chinese character “稻米” refers to “rice”, but he wants to use keywords in his language (Chinese J ), so he queries AGRIS in this way:

http://agris.fao.org/agris-search/searchIndex.do?query=稻米

The system discovers only 14 documents… Xian wants to access the International literature, so he wants also English articles! On the right side of the AGRIS interface, Xian enables the multilingual search and clicks on “GO”:  150,000 results! Maybe now Xian has to many articles to examine, but he can use other keywords to restrict the number of the results…