The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is set to host a webinar on 10 December 2024 to demonstrate how to improve article findability with controlled vocabularies. FAO’s valuable multilingual controlled vocabulary, AGROVOC, will be used as a use case in this webinar, which will be held in English. The webinar titled “Enhancing Article Findability in Agricultural Sciences with AGROVOC Thesaurus,” will have a focus on “Rural Transformation and Gender Equality”. 

Participants of this webinar will learn in-depth strategies for optimising the findability of data with controlled vocabularies, including:

• Gaining a comprehensive understanding of controlled vocabulary and its significance in organising and retrieving information in agricultural sciences;
• Becoming familiar with the AGROVOC thesaurus;
• Learning about the hierarchical structure of AGROVOC, including concepts, preferred terms, and relationships;
• Understanding how to leverage AGROVOC to improve the findability and visibility of articles in agricultural sciences;
• Acquiring knowledge of effective search strategies with AGROVOC;
• Learning best practices for integrating AGROVOC into their research workflow, ensuring consistency, accuracy, and interoperability in applying AGROVOC terms.

This is the fifth webinar in the series. Throughout the “Enhancing Article Findability in Agricultural Sciences with AGROVOC Thesaurus” series, each webinar will focus on a different discipline within FAO’s areas of interest, allowing specific examples to be utilised throughout the webinar. The fifth webinar will focus on “Rural Transformation and Gender Equality.”

Research4Life recently integrated AGROVOC as a “reference source” in the Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA) collection. Therefore, this webinar will provide in-depth information about how to access and use AGROVOC through the AGORA collection and the impact it can make on multilingual research for students, researchers, or professionals looking to take advantage of AGORA's extensive resources.

The webinar is intended for both prospective and present users of the AGORA platform.

Interested participants can register for the webinar here: https://fao.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMpc-CsqTwrGtR9YLR_yhssCOpSWfJmN6Ue 

More about AGROVOC

AGROVOC is a multilingual and controlled vocabulary that covers concepts and terminology under FAO's areas of interest. It is a structured collection of concepts, terms, definitions and relationships. These concepts can represent anything related to food and agriculture, spanning from specific terms like "maize" to broader concepts like "hunger," "aquaculture," "value chains," or "forestry."  AGROVOC plays a crucial role in providing unambiguous identification of resources, standardising indexing processes, and enhancing the efficiency of search functions. Additionally, each concept in AGROVOC is associated with terms used to express it in multiple languages, known as lexicalisations. Currently, AGROVOC  has over 41 000 concepts and  994 000 terms available in up to 42 languages.

More about AGORA

Since 2003, FAO has led the AGORA collection, which provides access to thousands of journals, e-books, and other information resources covering agriculture, fisheries, food, nutrition, veterinary science and related biological, environmental and social sciences in public institutions across the world.  The aim of the programme is to improve the quality and effectiveness of agricultural research, education and training in low-income countries.

Subscription-based journals and major scientific books remain important sources of high-quality scientific information that are crucial in advancing higher education, improving the ability to share findings, and informing about public policy decisions. AGORA is one of the five programmes that make up Research4Life.