The Agrontology is a description vocabulary defined in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) providing a set of domain-specific properties for agri-food related concepts. It is maintained by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) as a living ontology, enriched and improved based on users' feedback.

The Agrontology adds a semantic layer to any agri-food vocabulary or dataset that needs to represent domain-specific relations between entities of any kind (concepts, classes) in the areas covered by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

 

Figure 1. Example of non-hierarchical domain-specific relations represented by Agrontology properties. Source: FAO, 2023

The Agrontology includes 170 properties. The types of relationships that are covered are: process, causative, quantitative, spatial, taxonomic, partitive.

Examples of the semantics that the Agrontology can represent:

• Irrigation is a practice for flooded rice and influences soil salinization:
  
  “irrigation” (concept) “is practice for” (Agrontology property) “flooded rice” (concept)
  
  “irrigation” (concept) - “influences” (Agrontology property) - ”soil salinization” (concept)
• Rain causes lodging and lodging causes crop losses:
  
  “rain” (concept) “causes” (Agrontology property) “lodging” (concept)
  
  “lodging” (concept) “causes” (Agrontology property) “crop losses” (concept)

Looking at plant diseases:

• Huanglongbing is an economically important, vector-borne disease of citrus.
  
  “huanglongbing” (concept) “is disease for” (Agrontology property) “Rutaceae” (concept)
  
  “huanglongbing” (concept)  “has vector or host” (Agrontology property) - ”Diaphorina citri”  (concept) and “Trioza erytreae”  (concept)
• “Liberibacter” (concept) “causes” (Agrontology property)  “huanglongbing” (concept) 

Using URIs from the National Agricultural Library (NAL) Thesaurus, this could be illustrated as 

• “greening disease” (concept https://lod.nal.usda.gov/nalt/21818) “is disease for” (Agrontology property) “Rutaceae” (concept 
• https://lod.nal.usda.gov/nalt/3001 )
  
  “greening disease” (concept https://lod.nal.usda.gov/nalt/21818) “has vector or host” (Agrontology property) - ”Diaphorina citri”  (concept https://lod.nal.usda.gov/nalt/12935) and “Trioza erytreae”  (concept https://lod.nal.usda.gov/nalt/66440)
• “Candidatus Liberibacter” (concept https://lod.nal.usda.gov/nalt/21812) “causes” (Agrontology property)  “greening disease” (concept https://lod.nal.usda.gov/nalt/21818)

And this is a possible RDF serialization (in turtle):

@prefix agrontology: <http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrontology#&gt; .

@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#&gt; .

@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#&gt; .

@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#&gt; .

@prefix nalt: <https://lod.nal.usda.gov/nalt/&gt;

agrontology:isDiseaseFor a owl:ObjectProperty;

    rdfs:label "Is disease for"@en.

agrontology:hasHost a owl:ObjectProperty;

    rdfs:label "Has vector or host"@en.

agrontology:causes a owl:ObjectProperty;

    rdfs:label "Causes"@en.

nalt:21818 a skos:Concept;

    skos:prefLabel "greening disease"@en;

    agrontology:isDiseaseFor nalt:3001;

    agrontology:hasHost nalt:12935;

    agrontology:hasHost nalt:66440.

nalt:3001 a skos:Concept;

    skos:prefLabel "Rutaceae"@en.

nalt:12935 a skos:Concept;

    skos:prefLabel "Diaphorina citri"@en.    

nalt:66440 a skos:Concept;

    skos:prefLabel "Trioza erytreae"@en.

nalt:21812 a skos:Concept;

    skos:prefLabel "Candidatus Liberibacter"@en;

    agrontology:causes nalt:21818.

Using the Agrontology, agricultural specialist knowledge can be coded in a computer-readable way, and for example be used by expert systems (source: DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.21139.60969).

The Agrontology can also be used outside agriculture: “hand hygiene”  (concept)  is included in (Agrontology property) “non-pharmaceutical interventions”  (concept) and prevents (Agrontology property) “disease transmission”  (concept) . 

“These non-hierarchical relations express a notion of ‘relatedness’ between concepts. When applied correctly, these additional relationships provide more context and richness to the dataset" (source: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2020.105965).

A subset of the Agrontology is used for instance in the AGROVOC thesaurus to express domain-specific relations between concepts. Property labels and definitions for the 72 properties in that subset are available in the OWL file http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrontology in English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Russian. 

Figure 2. Subset of Agrontology properties grouped by type. Source: FAO, 2022

Access

The URI of the Agrontology ontology is: http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrontology and its namespace is http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrontology#

Ownership, license and maintenance

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is responsible for the maintenance of the Agrontology. The Agrontology is distributed under a CC-BY-4.0 license.

The Agrontology ontology is maintained by FAO in VocBench 3, a web-based vocabulary management tool. VocBench fully supports multilinguality and embodies a formalized editorial workflow.  

Feedback on the Agrontology is welcome: please contact [email protected].

Figure 3. The Agrontology is maintained in OWL in VocBench. Here, ”PestOf”. Source: FAO, 2024.