Using AGROVOC on the Organic Farm Knowledge Platform

A use case by Andreas Basler, Lauren Dietemann, Helga Willer, Research Institute of Organic Agriculture FiBL

The Research Institute of Organic Agriculture FiBL, the International Centre for Research in Organic Food Systems ICROFS and IFOAM Organics Europe set up the online platform Organic Farm Knowledge, a European web platform with information for organic farmers and advisors. The work was carried out within two European Union-funded projects: OK-Net Arable and OK-Net Ecofeed. 

Organic Farm Knowledge provides access to a wide range of tools and resources about organic farming and serves as a virtual meeting place for cross-border learning. At the core of the platform is the toolbox, a database with ‘tools’ for organic practitioners such as calculation tools, leaflets, guidelines, practice abstracts, books, reports, videos and further web-based materials. The metadata of the tools, including their English summaries, are automatically translated into 14 languages. 

The tools are stored initially on the Organic Eprints archive, and from there, they are imported into Organic Farm Knowledge. To ensure that the tools are searchable in the Organic Farm Knowledge toolbox, they are tagged with AGROVOC keywords. This is possible because the AGROVOC thesaurus has been integrated into Organic Eprints (Figure 1).

Together with further metadata, the AGROVOC keywords are exported from Organic Eprints to Organic Farm Knowledge, and the Organic Farm Knowledge toolbox can be browsed by keyword and theme. The main themes covered by the toolbox are: crop production, animal husbandry, soil, food chain management, farm management, environment and society. For this, a list of selected AGROVOC keywords is used (261 in total). 

On the backend of the multilingual Organic Farm Knowledge platform, translations of the AGROVOC keywords have been added. AGROVOC already provides a wide array of languages, but not all needed on the Organic Farm Knowledge platform. Hence, project partners have provided the relevant translations. 

Further information

Video “Organic Farm Knowledge – AGROVOC practical use case”. This video provides a short introduction on Organic Farm Knowledge and how AGROVOC is used.