AGROVOC Webinar: Land governance lost in translation: adopting semantic technologies to increase the discoverability of land data and information

As part of the 3rd AGROVOC Editorial Community Workshoporganized by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Laura Meggiolaro, Land Portal Foundation, presented a webinar on 29 June 2020. 

The webinar focused on Land governance lost in translation: adopting semantic technologies to increase the discoverability of land data and information. We definitely live in the era of big data and a huge amount of data and information has been produced in all disciplines during the last decade. Despite the increasingly interconnected world in which we live, language and technological barriers continue to be a very serious constraint to effectively exchange and learn from the plethora of information now available to us. Land is a topic that is discussed in many languages, in different academic disciplines and in all parts of the world. Many attempts have been made in the past to find common definitions and terminologies for land issues, but a wide consensus or adoption has not yet been reached. A new "thesaurus" LandVoc hopes to change this trend.

LandVoc is a thesaurus covering a taxonomy of concepts and terms related to the land issues.  The current LandVoc version includes 310 concepts relating to all areas of interest of the land community, including land administration, land governance, land use, investment and coverage, etc. It is available in English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Khmer, Vietnamese, Thai, Arabic,  Hindi, Swahili and other languages. It is published by FAO and exists as a sub-scheme within AGROVOC. The Land Portal Foundation has curated LandVoc since 2012, providing concrete suggestions and feedback and actively engaging with the AGROVOC FAO team on one hand and exchanging with a community of land experts to scope, review and enrich LandVoc on the other hand.