Maintenance

Who is the owner of AGROVOC? AGROVOC was created in the 1980s by FAO as an indexing tool for the AGRIS repository. Nowadays, AGROVOC is maintained by a wide community of experts and institutions, with the coordination and technical support of FAO. Copyright for AGROVOC content in FAO languages - English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and Chinese - is with FAO, while content in other languages rests with the institutions that authored it.  AGROVOC thesaurus content in English, Russian, French, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY-4.0). This licence allows you to share: copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially; adapt: remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. Attribution: You must give appropriate credit , provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. No additional restrictions: You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. If you need further assistance or have any questions related, please contact [email protected].

 Who maintains AGROVOC? AGROVOC is a collaborative effort. The AGROVOC team of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN keeps AGROVOC up to date, together with a number of institutions and individual domain experts serving as focal points for specific languages or topics. FAO carries mainly the responsibility for the six FAO languages (English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Russian), facilitates the technical maintenance of AGROVOC, including its publication as a Linked Open Data resource, and coordinates all editorial activities. 

How often is AGROVOC updated? AGROVOC is updated by our editors and our team on a continuous basis. Updated AGROVOC content is released once a month.

I would like to become an AGROVOC editor. How should I proceed? Talk to the AGROVOC team. The procedure for becoming an editor is the following: A) As a first step you should register on the VocBench Sandbox, where you can learn how the system works and where you can experiment with adding concepts, terms and relations as you wish. This is the link:  (first register for agrovoc-test version).  You will receive an email asking for a little more information, please reply to that. B) As soon as you feel comfortable with the system, please contact us at [email protected]. C) The last step is the registration on the VocBench production version. Once registered on the production version you can edit the actual AGROVOC thesaurus.

We have manuals for editors that explain how to work with VocBench and how to edit the AGROVOC thesaurus itself. The editing process: After having edited the thesaurus within the VocBench production version, your editing will be validated (accepted or rejected). Once the editing is accepted, it will be part of AGROVOC after the next update (usually monthly). We are looking forward to your contribution!

I am an AGROVOC editor. Where shall I "put" this new concept I want to add? We have created a manual for editors, which is meant to guide you through the process of contributing to AGROVOC.