Alignment between ASFA and AGROVOC thesauri completed

Thanks to some very hard work from the ASFA vocabulary working group and AGROVOC team, the ASFA Secretariat is pleased to announce that the alignment of ASFA concepts to the AGROVOC thesaurus is now complete. This means the ASFA thesaurus is now available to browse or download, which you can do here.  

The work of aligning ASFA to AGROVOC began in 2019 when ASFA first migrated its thesaurus to AGROVOC, a larger thesaurus covering concepts and terminology under FAO’s areas of interests. As the ASFA thesaurus is focused only on aquatic sciences, fisheries and aquaculture, it was necessary to review each of the 6 000+ concepts in ASFA and decide whether: the concept already existed in AGROVOC, in which case it could be mapped; the concept did not exist in AGROVOC but should be added; the concept did not exist in AGROVOC and did not need to be added, in which case it was removed from ASFA. At the end of this process, 4 993 ASFA concepts have been either mapped to AGROVOC or added as new concepts, with the remaining being removed as deemed to be no longer relevant. This process will ensure that the work that has gone into the ASFA thesaurus over the years is now available online to a wider audience, with growing multilingual coverage thanks to translations from ASFA partners and AGROVOC editors.