FAOAGROVOC is a multilingual controlled vocabulary covering all areas of interest to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), including food, nutrition, agriculture, fisheries, forestry, environment, and related socioeconomic domains. With over 42,000 concepts and up to 1,000,000 terms available in more than 42 languages, AGROVOC is one of the world's most extensive multilingual vocabularies and serves as a cornerstone of agricultural information management globally.
Background
FAO first published AGROVOC at the beginning of the 1980s in English, Spanish, and French to serve as a controlled vocabulary for indexing publications in the International System for Agricultural Science and Technology (AGRIS). In its early years, AGROVOC was a traditional thesaurus distributed in print.
The vocabulary has undergone significant technological transformation over the decades. In the 1990s, AGROVOC shifted from paper printing to a digital format with data storage handled by a relational database. In 2004, preliminary experiments with expressing AGROVOC in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) took place, and a web-based editing tool called WorkBench was developed -- now known as VocBench. In 2009, AGROVOC became a SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) resource, making it fully compatible with Semantic Web standards and Linked Open Data principles. This transition has enabled far broader reuse and interoperability than the original flat thesaurus structure permitted.
Purpose & Scope
AGROVOC provides standardized terminology for indexing, retrieving, and organizing information across the agricultural sciences and related domains. Its scope encompasses:
- Crop and animal production
- Fisheries and aquaculture
- Forestry and agroforestry
- Nutrition and food safety
- Natural resource management
- Agricultural economics and trade
- Rural development and land use
- Plant and animal health
- Biotechnology and genetics
- Environmental science and climate change
AGROVOC is employed for tagging resources, allowing searches in one language while providing results in many others, enhancing visibility worldwide. It also serves for organizing knowledge, standardizing agricultural information data, acting as a reference for translations, and finding applications in data mining, big data, and artificial intelligence.
Structure & Technical Design
AGROVOC is modeled using SKOS and published as Linked Open Data. Key structural characteristics include:
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| Concepts | Over 42,000 unique concepts |
| Terms | Up to 1,000,000 labels across all languages |
| Languages | More than 42 languages |
| Relationships | Hierarchical (broader/narrower) and associative (related) |
| Alignments | Mapped to external vocabularies (LCSH, MeSH, NALT, etc.) |
Concepts are assigned persistent URIs under the http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/ namespace, enabling stable linking from external datasets. Updated content is released once a month.
Access Methods
AGROVOC offers multiple access pathways:
- Web browsing: A Skosmos-based interface for searching and browsing concepts, viewing hierarchies, and exploring multilingual labels
- SPARQL endpoint: A standards-based query interface for programmatic data retrieval
- REST API: Provided through Skosmos for accessing vocabulary data programmatically
- Downloads: Bulk data available in RDF/XML, Turtle, N-Triples, and JSON-LD serializations
Governance & Maintenance
FAO coordinates the editorial activities related to AGROVOC maintenance. Content curation is carried out by a community of editors and institutions responsible for each language version, using VocBench as the distributed editing tool. FAO also facilitates the technical maintenance of the vocabulary infrastructure.
Copyright for AGROVOC content in FAO languages (English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, and Chinese) is held by FAO and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY-4.0). Content in other languages remains the copyright of the institutions that authored it.
Notable Implementations
AGROVOC is used as the primary indexing vocabulary by the AGRIS database, the FAO library catalog, and many national and regional agricultural information systems across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It is integrated into the Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) platform and used by CGIAR research centers, CIRAD, and other international agricultural research organizations. AGROVOC concepts are mapped to other major vocabularies including the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), MeSH, the NAL Thesaurus, and the CAB Thesaurus, facilitating cross-domain information retrieval.
Related Standards
- ASFA Thesaurus -- used for aquatic sciences and fisheries literature
- CAB Thesaurus -- maintained by CABI for agricultural and biological sciences
- NAL Thesaurus -- maintained by the U.S. National Agricultural Library
- SKOS -- the W3C standard used to model and publish AGROVOC as Linked Open Data