The goal of the GACS project is to create a Global Agricultural Concept Scheme as a hub for thesauri in the agricultural field, in multiple languages, for use in Linked Data.The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), CAB International (CABI), and the National Agricultural Library of the USA (NAL) agreed in October 2013 to explore the feasibility of developing a shared concept scheme by integrating their three thesauri: the AGROVOC Concept Scheme, the CAB Thesaurus (CABT), and NAL Thesaurus (NALT).

1. Global Agricultural Concept
Scheme (GACS)
Johannes Keizer, Simon Liu, Martin Parr
Global GODAN/CIARD Consultation on Open Agricultural Knowledge for Development
22-24 April 2014
Rome, Italy

2. Global Agricultural Content Scheme
(GACS)
• Who?
• Why?
• What?
• How?

3. • Johannes Keizer
• Simon Liu
• Martin Parr
Who?

4. What words describe this picture?
Swine? Pig?
Porcine? Hog?
Sus scrofa domestica?

5. • Acronyms
Synonyms
- ABA vs. abscisic acid
- DHBV vs. Duck hepatitis B virus
- WHO vs. World Health Organization
• Plural / Singular
- pigs vs. pig
- renal calculi vs. renal calculus
• Spelling variants
- Sugar beet vs. Sugarbeet
- Buddleja vs. Buddleia
• Usage variants
- Aubergines vs. Eggplants
- Palta vs. Aguacate vs. Avocado
• Quasi-synonyms…

6. Turkey
Pieris
Homographs

7. Scientific vs. Common Names
● Heliothis zea
● Helicoverpa zea
● Tomato fruitworm
● Corn earworm
● Bollworm

8. Needs a Thesaurus
• Share common understanding of the structure of
information
- Among people
- Among systems/databases
- Among people & systems/databases
• Provide consistency & reduce variability
• Enable reuse of domain knowledge
• Avoid re-inventing the wheel
• Enable interoperability

9. Existing Thesauri
NALT
AGROVOC
CABT

10. Why GACS?
We have some common beliefs
● We serve consumers of agricultural scientific
knowledge
● We want to help them better navigate to and
understand content
● We recognise the concept of global public goods and
the value of open access & open data
● We have identified the need for a unified agricultural
language system to support describing open data

11. Why GACS?
We have some common challenges
● G8 Conference on Open Data in Agriculture & Nutrition
● In the age of open data we need common semantics to
describe data thus enabling linking different types of
information & data
● We each manage an agricultural thesaurus:
AGROVOC, NAL Thesaurus, CAB Thesaurus
● These three thesauri meet the needs of their parent
organizations, but they have differences

12. Why GACS?
We share some common knowledge

13. GACS Uses
• Information description & structuring
• Spelling aid
• Natural language processing
• Information retrieval
• Information mapping & integration
• Automated indexing

14. What?
Global Agriculture Concept Scheme
GACS …
● A global unified agricultural language system
● Address the differences and builds alignments between
AGROVOC, CABT and NALT
● Public
● Open (and moving to Open Data)
● Collaborative (CABI, NAL, FAO)
● Extensible (scope and partners)
● An integrated offering
● A working model (a bit more than a Proof of Concept?)

15. What?
GACS aspires to …
● Be owned and maintained by a consortium?
● Bring economies of scale to partners and users
● Avoid duplication of effort in new organisations moving
to open data environments
● Improve efficiency of information and data management
in the long term
● Improve the discoverability of information and data to
the benefit of farmers, researchers and policy makers

16. How?
● Signed agreement between CABI, FAO, NAL to work
together to develop GACS, covering
● Options for alignment
● Technical Approach
● Governance
● Resources & Milestones
● Commission independent consultants to review existing
thesauri and host organisation workflows and business
needs
● Host and participate in workshops, working closely with
policy makers
● This is what we hope to help start to answer here

17. How?
Potential for alignment

18. Meeting
Outcomes
.
Building common understanding
Fact finding for consultants Part 1 report
Communicate the need for GACS in an open
data environment?
Support for GACS

19. Thank You

20. Questions?
● We are proposing an approach to address a need for a unified agricultural language
system.
Is this a real need? Will this workshop validate the need?
Is this a useful approach? Is this an important development?
● At the moment there are three organisations involved and three thesauri. Which
organisations are missing? Which vocabularies/thesauri are missing? Is it
important that they are included in this ‘proof of concept’ stage. What would the
nature of their participation be?
● Who would be the main users of GACS? Do we have enough ‘use cases’ to help
people understand the utility of GACS?
● We will need to address the governance of GACS. What sort of models would
work? What innovative solutions for governance would be possible?
● Have we missed anything? Are there alternatives?

21. Conclusions of the meeting?
● There is a need for GACS, this approach is important/essential, and although there
may be other partners at this moment we want to scope out and implement a first
phase.