AGROVOC at CIRAD, a reference tool in a FAIR institutional approach for publications and research data

CIRAD is the French agricultural research and international cooperation organization working for the sustainable development of tropical and Mediterranean regions. Since 2006, CIRAD has been committed to open science and has made it part of its institutional strategy. Research teams are encouraged to disseminate their scientific results as openly as possible. 

The Scientific and Technical Information (STI) service is in charge of acquiring and disseminating scientific production, and supports CIRAD's teams in information analysis, publication, and research data management. Through the institutional portal “Sharing Knowledge in Science”, the CIRAD STI Service brings together and provides access to the various platforms for disseminating publications and research data produced or co-produced by CIRAD with its partners.

Among these platforms, Agritrop, as the open archive of CIRAD publications, and CIRAD Dataverse, as the institutional research data repository, play a key role in meeting the needs to discover, explore, read and reuse scientific information in the area of Agricultural Sciences.

The use case based on an information system(s) or practical use case(s)

Agritrop provides free access to CIRAD's written scientific output, while respecting copyright. Agritrop is fed by the publications deposited by CIRAD researchers. In 2021, Agritrop contained 108 300 references and 

49 230 full-text documents in the fields of agricultural research and rural development in Southern countries. Currently, 29 580 documents are available for free on the internet. In this context, AGROVOC has been used, since 1986, to index scientific publications and describe them both thematically and geographically, see Figure 1.

Since then, CIRAD's scientific information service has actively participated in the AGROVOC editorial community. Specialized librarians use AGROVOC in their indexing work. They have an in-depth knowledge of the thesaurus, which allows them to contribute in several levels:

• spelling corrections of French labels
• proposal of new concepts with labels in French and English
• consistency of the thesaurus according to the ISO 25964-1 standard

CIRAD's scientific information service participates each year in the annual meetings organized by the FAO AGROVOC team, since 2018.

In connection with these activities, the ISSA project aims to replace current manual indexing with an automated one in Agritrop and to develop advanced services to researchers using artificial intelligence techniques. Through its different work packages, the Issa project is not only interested in the automatic indexing of scientific publications with AGROVOC, but, also in addressing issues of alignment and overlap with other standard repositories such as Wikidata or GeoNames.

Benefits of using AGROVOC

AGROVOC 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 (publications, research data), standardizing agricultural information data or in artificial intelligence projects (data/text mining, automated indexing task, etc.)

The following use cases illustrate the potential of AGROVOC and its added-value for CIRAD and its partners:

• Indicators of CIRAD publications: visualization of metrics calculated from Agritrop publications, for example; by filtering on the main topics (AGROVOC descriptors) covered by CIRAD publications, see Figure 2.

• CIRAD maps and atlas geovisualization on the French Navigae portal, where the 895 CIRAD maps recorded in Agritrop and exported into Navigae can be searched and displayed through AGROVOC descriptors, see Figure 3.

AGROVOC has also been the indexing vocabulary adopted by CIRAD for its libraries catalogue and for its Data verse repository, facilitating discovery and access of their contents by users.