FAO AGROVOC Editorial Community and CGIAR Task Group meet for the first time

Launched in 2021, the FAO and CGIAR collaboration on increasing interoperability between food and agricultural information systems provides an opportunity for CGIAR to suggest new concepts and terms to the FAO AGROVOC thesaurus. 

New terminology experts from CGIAR have been integrated in the AGROVOC Editorial Community. The first activity, held online last 16 of February, focused on the latest improvements in multilinguality available to manage and utilize the 41 languages currently in use in AGROVOC. 

During the event, the FAO AGROVOC team manager Imma Subirats and the co-chair of the CGIAR Ontologies Community of Practice Elisabeth Arnaud from Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT welcomed all the participants and presented the collaboration between the two organizations. Kristin Kolshus, AGROVOC Content Curator, and Andrea Turbati, AGROVOC Technical Expert, delivered the session.

Around 30 colleagues from AGROVOC and CGIAR joined the event. The presentation covered several topics concerning FAO thesaurus and the improvements in multilinguality in Skosmos and VocBench. An interesting discussion ensued, including questions on regional variants of Spanish, and the new CGIAR sub-vocabulary which provides direct visibility of CGIAR-contributed concepts in AGROVOC.

As highlighted in the CGIAR Report “Increasing interoperability between food and agricultural systems: CGIAR and FAO collaboration”,

CGIAR strengthens its contribution to AGROVOC, thus supporting the consolidation of the semantic landscape for labeling data in agriculture and food systems. 

New activities are planned in the course of 2022 with the aim of enhancing this collaboration and facilitating the knowledge exchange between the CGIAR Task Group and the AGROVOC Editorial Community. Some of these activities will be open to all the people interested in AGROVOC: stay tuned and follow all our news through the FAO AIMS Newsletter and Twitter account.