A meeting held on 5-6 November 2019 at FAO in Rome assessed the current status and future prospects for the Global Agricultural Concept Space (GACS)  -- a Linked Open Data concept scheme created by mapping frequently-used concepts at the intersection of three major agricultural thesauri: the AGROVOC Thesaurus, the CAB Thesaurus (CABT), and NAL Thesaurus (NALT). 

GACS was created between 2014 and 2016 by a working group of thesaurus experts from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), CAB International (CABI), and the National Agricultural Library of the USA (NAL) . In May 2016 the GACS Core Beta was published.  As of November 2019, no substantive work had been done on GACS  for three years.

At the November 2019 meeting the participants agreed that GACS URIs should not be promoted for use since GACS is not actively being maintained.  FAO, NAL, and CABI agreed to inform users and potential users that GACS Core is not currently being updated.  Data is from 2016 and will not be actively maintained in the future.

As a next step, the partners will verify whether the four-year-old mappings from GACS to AGROVOC, NAL Thesaurus, and CAB Thesaurus remain valid today.