AGROVOC: The linked data concept hub for food and agriculture

Imma Subirats-Coll, Kristin Kolshus, Andrea Turbati, Armando Stellato, Esther Mietzsch, Daniel Martini, Marcia Zeng, AGROVOC: The linked data concept hub for food and agriculture, Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, Volume 196, 2022, 105965, ISSN 0168-1699, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2020.105965. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168169920331707)

Newly acquired, aggregated and shared data are essential for innovation in food and agriculture to improve the discoverability of research. Since the early 1980′s, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has coordinated AGROVOC, a valuable tool for data to be classified homogeneously, facilitating interoperability and reuse. AGROVOC is a multilingual and controlled vocabulary designed to cover concepts and terminology under FAO's areas of interest. It is the largest Linked Open Data set about agriculture available for public use and its highest impact is through facilitating the access and visibility of data across domains and languages. This chapter has the aim of describing the current status of one of the most popular thesaurus in all FAO’s areas of interest, and how it has become the Linked Data Concept Hub for food and agriculture, through new procedures put in place. Keywords: Agricultural Sciences; Research Data; Linked Open Data; Semantic Web; Interoperability; Data