The AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench System: Empowering management of agricultural vocabularies with semantics

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is recognized as an information and knowledge-base organization. FAO's activities comprise four main areas which are closely related to various aspects of information and knowledge: capture and analyze, disseminate and share, localize and provide. The goal of developing and maintaining tools for information and knowledge management is attributed to the Office of Knowledge Exchange, Research and Extension (OEK) of FAO. One of the most important resources for covering the terminology of all subject fields in agriculture domain is the AGROVOC thesaurus, which evolved into a semantic system in order to provide ontology services. This newly reengineered system is called the “AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench (ACSW)”. This article analyzes the different knowledge productions modes for the traditional AGROVOC and the new ACSW system: mode I assimilate to the traditional AGROVOC Thesaurus management and mode II to the ACSW system