FAO and CGIAR have established a collaboration to enhance data sharing in the food and agricultural domain through the further use and enhancement of the AGROVOC Thesaurus, a multilingual controlled vocabulary that covers terminology related to FAO’s areas of interest. AGROVOC is a valuable tool to classify data homogeneously, facilitate interoperability and reuse. It can ease the collection, storage and use of agronomic data, enabling easy and reuse of the data by humans and machines.

FAO has coordinated AGROVOC since the early 1980s and it has been translated into 40 languages since its inception. The CGIAR is a long-time user of AGROVOC. It is the keyword source recommended by the CG Core metadata schema for data sets and publications stored in open repositories and the Global Agricultural Research Data Innovation Acceleration Network (GARDIAN).

The Ontologies Community of Practice of the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture organizes the submission of CGIAR concepts to AGROVOC and links  Agronomy Ontology terms to AGROVOC.

This year the Information and Data Management Community of Practice of the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture has created a Task Group co-chaired by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and the Alliance Bioversity International-CIAT that will define the CGIAR collaboration framework to enrich AGROVOC.

Task-Force members  

Co-Chairs: Olatunbosun Obileye, IITA Elizabeth Arnaud, Alliance Bioversity-CIAT FAO-AGROVOC members Kristin Kolshus Imma Subirats Andrea Turbati

CGIAR members Enrico Bonaiuti, ICARDA Sara Jani, ICARDA Soonho Kim, IFPRI Marie-Angélique Laporte, Alliance Bioversity-CIAT Jacqueline Muliro, WorldFish Erica Saito, IFPRI Leigh Plummer, IFPRI Abenet Yabowork, ILRI

This collaboration will bring mutual benefits and strengthen the awareness of AGROVOC within CGIAR, while FAO will benefit from the in-depth field experts contributing to current research terminology in subjects related to the FAO’s work.

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