Abstract
Progress on research and innovation in food technology depends increasingly on the use of structured vocabularies—concept schemes, thesauri, and ontologies—for discovering and re-using a diversity of data sources. Here, we report on GACS Core, a concept scheme in the larger Global Agricultural Concept Space (GACS), which was formed by mapping between the most frequently used concepts of AGROVOC, CAB Thesaurus, and NAL Thesaurus and serves as a target for mapping near-equivalent concepts from other vocabularies. It provides globally unique identifiers, which can be used as keywords in bibliographic databases, tags for web content, for building lightweight facet schemes, and for annotating spreadsheets, databases, and image metadata using synonyms and variant labels in 25 languages. The minimal semantics of GACS allows terms defined with more precision in ontologies, or less precision in controlled vocabularies, to be linked together making it easier to discover and integrate semantically diverse data sources.
Highlights
Sustainable agricultural value chains and global food security cannot be achieved without intelligent use and re-use of data
This paper describes Global Agricultural Concept Space (GACS), a namespace of concepts relevant to food and agriculture, and the choices made in designing its first concept scheme, GACS Core
GACS Core was created as a mapping target for the concepts most frequently used in three current, long-standing, concept schemes: AGROVOC
Summary
Sustainable agricultural value chains and global food security cannot be achieved without intelligent use and re-use of data. GACS Core was created as a mapping target for the concepts most frequently used in three current, long-standing, concept schemes: AGROVOC (http://aims.fao.org/agrovoc), CAB Thesaurus (https:// www.cabi.org/cabthesaurus), and National Agricultural Library (NAL) Thesaurus (https://agclass.nal.usda.gov). These three concept schemes are used by their respective institutions to index over 25 million bibliographic records, as well as myriad institutions and agencies in their applications. GACS Core, in contrast, defines a chain of generically broader concepts relating mammary glands to animal organs without specifying how the concepts relate in terms of mathematical set theory This relative lack of precise semantics minimizes the maintenance costs of GACS Core and maximizes its potential for re-use across a broad range of applications. GACS affords an interoperable layer transforming massive dog is a mammal, mammal is an animal, dog is an data silos to a more reusable web of data and services by making previously hidden or obscure resources more discoverable
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