AGROVOC

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. 

AGROVOC consists of over 36,000 concepts available in up to 29 languages. Currently, AGROVOC is an SKOS-XL concept scheme, and a Linked Open Data (LOD) set edited by VocBench.

The AGROVOC thesaurus was first published (in English, Spanish and French) at the beginning of the 1980s by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. In 2000, AGROVOC abandoned paper printing and went digital, with data storage handled by a relational database. In 2009 AGROVOC became an SKOS resource.

Today, AGROVOC is available  as an SKOS-XL concept scheme, also published as a Linked Data (LD) set composed of 35,000+ concepts available in up to 29 languages. By means of LD, AGROVOC is aligned to 18 open datasets related to agriculture (see: AGROVOC LD). The advantage of having a thesaurus like AGROVOC published as LD is that once thesauri are linked, the resources they index are linked as well.

AGROVOC is widely used in specialized libraries as well as digital libraries and repositories to index content and for the purpose of text mining. It is also used as a specialized tagging resource for knowledge and content organization by FAO and other third-party stakeholders.

Currently, AGROVOC multilingual thesaurus is a collaborative effort, coordinated by FAO, and maintained by an international community of experts and institutions active in the area of agriculture and related domains.