AGROVOC Editorial Community. Germany

The Kuratorium für Technik und Bauwesen in der Landwirtschaft e.V. (KTBL) provides data and information about new technologies in agriculture for the benefit of farmers, consultants, and decision makers. Circa three people from the Databases and Knowledge Technologies department at KTBL support the AGROVOC editorial work by contributing translations, concepts and by bringing in technical expertise where appropriate. KTBL delivers publications and software application on a multitude of agricultural topics, develops ontologies and edits several smaller, specific glossaries on machinery, bioenergy, climate protection and other topics.

AGROVOC, as the most complete and elaborate multilingual vocabulary for agriculture, is seen as a crucial component for annotation and labeling within that context and thus a prerequisite for innovative information retrieval tools to be provided in the future. During the past year, KTBL fixed a number of issues with German translations in AGROVOC, with a large block of changes to be imported soon. KTBL also hosted the AGROVOC editors' meeting in June 2019. For the coming year, KTBL plans to add concepts related to agricultural machinery, an area of special expertise of KTBL.

ZALF, a research institute in Müncheberg, Germany, researches on topics such as sustainable management strategies, ecology, and soil science. It comments and cross-checks proposed changes from KTBL and provides new concepts that are required mainly for research dataset annotation. In the context of the BonaRes project, a large national project on "soil as a sustainable resource for the bioeconomy", a data repository for soil and agricultural research data has been set up under the leadership of ZALF. All incoming research data are described by the BonaRes Metadata Schema, which supports all DataCite and INSPIRE elements. The schema implements AGROVOC keyword annotations to improve data findability and an important part to fulfil modern FAIR data principles. As it was recognized, that soil concepts are incomplete and partly inadequate translated or classified, the BonaRes team started in 2019 internal reviews and discussions on existing and missing concepts to improve and extend AGROVOC. The AGROVOC editor and ZALF employee Carsten Hoffmann attended the two editor workshops in Utrecht and Darmstadt; through Vocbench3, he has contributed improvements and extensions to the thesaurus on a quarterly basis. This work will be continued in the coming years.

AGROVOC is a controlled vocabulary covering all areas of interest of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. It 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 content organization by FAO and third-party stakeholders. AGROVOC is published monthly with the aim to improve the quality of the services for the agricultural community, AGROVOC is now engaging with expert communities that are contributing and benefiting of the AGROVOC services.