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1 Introduction


The objective of this project is to link two multilingual terminology sources related to agriculture, the Chinese Agricultural Thesaurus[1] (CAT) and AGROVOC[2]. The motivation is to create correspondences between different world views/multilingual perspectives, to mutually enrich both terminologies in terms of domain and language coverage, and to improve their structure. Because mapping increases the interoperability of the source terminologies, information retrieval applications that include functionalities such as cross-linguistic searches and terminology brokering will be made possible (see fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Reconciling different world views

In addition, in terms of FAO’s Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) initiative, this project will demonstrate the feasibility of incorporating other terminologies within the AGROVOC Concept Server via mapping. By mapping we mean the creation of an explicit link, using our specifications of the Simple Knowledge Organization System[3] (SKOS) mapping rules, from one source (CAT) to another (AGROVOC). Source and target vocabularies may be revised, when inconsistencies or error are encountered, but each is structurally independent of the other; mutual consistency is desirable but less a priority than establishing approximate equivalences.

A test has already been carried out on some sample data involving top terms and their lower branches (child nodes) in the cereal crops sub-domain from both CAT and AGROVOC.


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