The AGROVOC Concept Server: rationale, goals and usage

The main objective of the AGROVOC Concept Server (CS) is to create a collaborative reference platform and a “one‐stop” shop for a pool of commonly used concepts related to agriculture, containing terms, definitions and relationships between terms in multiple languages derived from various sources. This paper aims to address the issues.

The CS offers a centralised facility where the agricultural information management community can build and share agricultural knowledge in a collaborative environment.

The advantages of the CS are its extensibility and modularity that provide the possibility to extend the type of information that can be stored in this system based on user/community needs.

Further investigation still needs to be done on the modularisation of the CS (i.e. the creation of separated ontologies that can still be connected, in order to have domain‐related ontologies and to allow for better performance of the CS).

The CS serves as starting point for the development of specific domain ontologies where multilinguality and the localised representation of knowledge are essential issues. Furthermore, it will offer additional services in order to expose the knowledge to be consumed by other applications.

The CS Workbench provides the AGROVOC partners with the possibility to directly and collaboratively edit the AGROVOC CS. It thus provides the opportunity for direct and open “many‐to‐many” communication links between communities, avoiding decentralised communication between partners and duplication of effort. For the international community, it may allow users to manage, re‐use or extend agriculture‐related knowledge for better interoperability and for improved services.