Webinar about CGIAR contribution to the AGROVOC Thesaurus

On 21 June CGIAR and FAO held a joint webinar on the CGIAR contribution to the AGROVOC, the multilingual structured thesaurus for subject fields related to FAO’s areas of interest. Established in June last year, the collaboration between CGIAR and FAO on AGROVOC aims to increase interoperability between food and agricultural information systems. As a first step the CGIAR Task Group was set up to enhance the collaboration, focusing on improving AGROVOC content developed on the requirements from CGIAR information systems and repositories.  

Last October, the CGIAR Task Group started to collect content to be added to AGROVOC, based on most-used keywords from the CGIAR side. This webinar represented an occasion to present some results on the work of the CGIAR Task Group which has steadily been suggesting concepts and topics to be added to AGROVOC. The webinar also offered an opportunity to discuss progress, as well as objectives and goals for the upcoming months. 

AGROVOC is extensively used by the CGIAR as a tool to harmonize the content among its repositories. Additionally the CGIAR Metadata Schema also recommends its use to facilitate the interoperability of the research data. The new concepts being suggested by the CGIAR Task Group cover a wide range of topics, and are a welcome enrichment of the AGROVOC content and coverage.

Below, the list of members of the CGIAR Task Group working on AGROVOC:

* AfricaRice

* International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA)

* International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

* International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA)

* International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)

* International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT)

* International Potato Center (CIP)

* International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)

* International Water Management Institute (IWMI)

* The Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT)

* WorldFish