Use cases to be published on AGROVOC website

Last June, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) issued a call for use cases about the adoption and use of its AGROVOC multilingual thesaurus, as part of the activities that are taking place in 2021 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the thesaurus. A selection of the best contributions was presented during the AGROVOC Annual Event held online on 29 June 2021. 

All the use cases received will be translated into the six official FAO languages - Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish - and published on a new dedicated webpage in the coming months. On one hand, it represents a unique opportunity to better understand how users interact with AGROVOC; on the other hand, it will show other users its potential applications.

According to the contributions received, some of the most common benefits coming from the use of AGROVOC are: the multilingualism and the availability of labels in multiple languages; the indexing of scientific productions that increases their visibility; and the use of AGROVOC as a reference for the standardization of terms improving data findability.

International organizations from Nepal, Germany, Senegal, Indonesia, Russia, Brazil, and Kenya submitted their cases, introduced their institution, explained how they use AGROVOC, highlighting the benefits for their organization and for their work. 

Anil Kumar Jha from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development  (ICIMOD) took part to the call, and wrote that AGROVOC is very well updated and close to ICIMOD's subject areas:

“It provides well-defined subject headings and suggests entry terms. AGROVOC is also multilingual, containing at least two of our regional languages – Chinese and Hindi. It is very helpful to know the meanings of key terms in these regional languages. The thesaurus is another major tool for information and knowledge management.”

Anne Toulet from the Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement (CIRAD) also highlighted the benefits of AGROVOC, which is a world reference in agronomy:

“…. It is particularly well suited to the needs of an organization such as CIRAD, whose research fields are mainly covered by the thesaurus. AGROVOC is used in various activities such as indexing scientific productions, standardizing agricultural information data or in artificial intelligence projects.”

Every week, the publication of a new use case will be announced on @FAOAIMS Twitter account.