Multilinguality in AGROVOC Concept Scheme: Challenges and Experiences
M. Lim Sien Niu, Gudrun Johannsen, Ahsan Morshed, Sachit Rajbhandari, Johannes Keizer, L. Veera Kiran, Aree Thunkijjanukij, N. Ezam Selan · 2012
AGROVOC plays a significant role in setting the standards as a common data model for representing and linking multilingual information from Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries, Food and other related domains resources unequivocally. Researchers, librarians, terminologist and information managers from international organizations leverage on AGROVOC as the controlled vocabulary to access, translate and share their knowledge collaboratively. Since 1982, AGROVOC has evolved from a traditional thesaurus to an ontology based OWL model and finally to a SKOSXL 2 model. Based on the model, FAO 3 built a web based vocabulary management tool called “VocBench” which can handle the multilinguality concurrently. This paper outlines the challenges of multilinguality in AGROVOC Concept Scheme, as well as the experiences and processes of converting multilingual information 1 Web Ontology Language (OWL). 2 Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS). 3 The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation (FAO). from heterogeneous data formats into the AGROVOC Knowledge Base.