Dr. Caterina Caracciolo is an Information Management Specialist at FAO and is currently the AGROVOC Thesaurus manager within the AIMS team. We asked her a few questions about AGROVOC maintenance, management, use and latest developments.

How is AGROVOC maintained?

The maintenance of AGROVOC has changed radically over the years. Until only a few years ago, adding a new language to AGROVOC implied sending SQL dumps to partners for translation, and then including the translated text into the AGROVOC master copy -- with the whole sequence of consistency checks and harmonization you can imagine the work involved. But that is all history now. Nowadays, any editor, at any point in time can access the latest “version” of AGROVOC through VocBench. Concurrent version are managed automatically and a formal workflow is implemented, so that editors may add their contribution to AGROVOC at which it is then validated by users with the appropriate rights (Validators).  This implies that we are now moving from the traditional setting, with one institutional editor per language to a more modern and flexible setting, where editors may be specialized per language, per subject, or both.

How has AGROVOC use evolved over the last few years?

The use of AGROVOC has evolved quite a bit over the years. In addition to its traditional area of applications -libraries -AGROVOC is now used for information indexing in general, for website development, and as a terminological resource (for example, for translating technical terms). On the AGROVOC website, you can find a list of applications using it. However, this list only includes the applications of which we are aware. Do not hesitate to contact us in case you are not yet in that list, or if you want to add details about your already listed application.

Could you state ways of accessing AGROVOC, and what developments are planned to facilitate easier access to AGROVOC?

In short, AGROVOC may be browsed and searched through the web, but also downloaded (RDF format), or accessed live through web services and a SPARQL endpoint. Detailed information related to how to access AGROVOC is available from our web page.

We are planning a new web interface for browsing and searching AGROVOC. 

How can interested users be part of the AGROVOC discussions or community of users ?

We always announce the news about AGROVOC on our website - either in the static pages, or in the form of posts and/or included in the AIMS Newsletter. You can subscribe to AIMS and choose AGROVOC as a tag, in that way you will always receive any content related to AGROVOC. Moreover, we have recently activated a mailing list for AGROVOC editors to discuss on issues related to AGROVOC content, such as spelling conventions for multilingual thesauri, hierarchy organization, workflow policies and the like.

What is planned for the future?

Many things… By coming October we want to have a demonstrable version of the alignment of AGROVOC, CAB Thesaurus and NAL Thesaurus, and proceed with the creation of a “GACS Core” [GACS -Global Agricultural Concept Scheme]. We would also like to expand the mapping of AGROVOC to other vocabularies and data sets. For example, we have had some preliminary discussions about linking AGROVOC with FAOlex which would ultimately result in linking scientific and policy documents together – exciting!

Of course, we take care of the daily maintenance of AGROVOC, but we are also considering improvements to its modelling, for example in terms of wider support to 'multilinguality', and a new online browsing tool. We would also like to further expand the language coverage of AGROVOC, so feel free to propose yourself to become an AGROVOC editor!