The November 2020 version of the AGROVOC thesaurus has been released now boasting 37,900 concepts and 787,238 terms, in up to 40 languages. The AGROVOC team wishes to thank all of the AGROVOC editors, helping to contribute to the addition of concepts, terms and languages. Learn more information about the AGROVOC editors here.

During the 2020 NKOS Workshop, which was held as a virtual meeting 9-10 September 2020, the AGROVOC team presented its work on COVID-19 as part of sessions on "Terminology Development and KOS Mapping.” The AGROVOC presentation shared examples of issues related to multilingual AGROVOC terminology development, using COVID-19 related concepts as an example. This session presented challenges along with the decision-making process, as well as how the multilingual preferred terms are selected. The recording is available here. 

Even more, as part of the 2020 Virtual United Nations World Data Forum, which took place from 19 to 21 October, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) presented a session entitled: “Use of semantics applied to food and agricultural data innovation systems as a key step to achieving the SDGs.” Learn more and watch the session recording here.

How AGROVOC is leveraging semantic technologies and linked open data to support the FAIR principles.

AGROVOC is a controlled vocabulary covering all areas of interest of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, including food, nutrition, agriculture, fisheries, forestry, environment etc. It is published by FAO and edited by a community of experts. It is widely used in specialized libraries as well as digital libraries and repositories to index content and for the purpose of text mining.