Presentation delivered at the Agricultural Data Interoperability Interest Group -- Research Data Alliance (RDA) 4th Plenary Meeting -- Amsterdam, September 2014

1. The GACS Project
Caterina Caracciolo
FAO
Amsterdam, 22 Sept. 2014

2. What is GACS?
• A collaboration between
– FAO (AGROVOC)
– NAL of USA (NAL Thesaurus)
– CABI (CAB Thesaurus)
• To make a common repository of
terminological and conceptual information in
agriculture

3. Why?
• To coordinate efforts in the same area
• And profit from differences of the three
thesauri

4. Who?
• FAO - AGROVOC thesaurus
– 32,000 concepts (RDF/SKOS native), 20 languages
– Covering agriculture, fisheries, forestry,
environment, food, ...
• CABI – CAB Thesaurus
– 245,000 terms, 11 languages (4 currently updated)
– Majority, scientific names
• NAL – NAL Thesaurus
– ~100,000 terms. English, Spanish. Most chemicals

5. AGROVOC (website to change soon)

6. NAL Thesaurus

7. CAB Thesaurus

8. How?
Phase 1: Feasibility study (concluded)
Phase 2: Creation of a GACS core (now - early 2015)
– A core of ~10,000 concepts aligned in the three
thesauri
– Separate URIs
Phase 3: The “real” GACS
– Expansion of the core
– Expansion of the partnership

9. Some questions/issues

10. Some questions/issues
• Is there an overlap between the three
thesauri?
• What is the potential for alignment?
• How to select the “core”?
• Will provenance information be kept?
• What to do with different hierarchies?
• Infrastructure?

11. Is there an overlap between the three?

12. An estimate of potential for
alignment

13. How to select the core?
1. Selection of “seeds” of 10,000 concepts
based on use in app of choice

14. How to select the core?
2. Run mapping algorithms and get a “single”
core, then to be manually assessed

15. What is the frequency of concepts
used for a corpus?
--- A sample from Agris

16. Will provenance information be kept?
• Yes, it is fundamental for all
• We agreed on a set of metadata to keep at
the level of concept and terms
– Creator, Date of creation, Date of last update, ..
– Agreed format is SKOS-XL, to be able to make
statements on

17. Hierarchies may be different, although
similar...

18. What about the GACS infrastructure?
• Suite of tools:
– VocBench for editing (FAO, U of Tor Vergata)
– Skosmos (Finnish National Library)
• Exposure and publication to be arranged,
supported by FAO

19. Pointers
• On aims.fao.org we regularly publish updates
– register to bulletins
• GACS reports published so far:
– http://aims.fao.org/community/agrovoc/blogs/ph
ase-one-gacs-approved-read-reports
• A website will follow