FAO cooperates with CGIAR to increase interoperability between food and agricultural information systems

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. 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).

This year CGIAR created a Task Group co-chaired by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) that will define the CGIAR collaboration framework to enrich AGROVOC.  This collaboration supports the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture  and the Agronomy Ontology (AgrO) through the Information and Data Management Community of Practice and the Ontologies Community of Practice. Aside from organizing the submission of CGIAR concepts, AGROVOC provides terms from the agronomy domain organized semantically. This work is being expanded to the ontologies of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry useful for the agrifood domain.