AGROVOC Thesaurus

Since the early 1980’s, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has coordinated AGROVOC, a valuable tool for classifying data homogeneously, facilitating interoperability and reuse.

AGROVOC is a multilingual and controlled vocabulary designed to cover concepts and terminology under FAO's areas of interest. It is the largest Linked Open Data set about agriculture available for public use and its greatest impact is through providing the access and visibility of data across domains and languages.

AGROVOC provides a way to organize knowledge for subsequent data retrieval and consists of a structured collection of concepts, terms, definitions and relationships. Concepts represent anything in food and agriculture, such as maize, hunger, aquaculture, value chains or forestry; these concepts are used to unambiguously identify resources, allowing standardized indexing processes to make searching more efficient. Each AGROVOC concept also has terms used to express it in various languages, known as lexicalizations. Today, AGROVOC consists of more than 40 000 concepts and 931 000 terms in up to 41 languages.

Over recent years, AGROVOC has evolved to become a valued information resource worldwide with considerable use.

Date-neutral links to newest release:

More formats and older versions are available on request to agrovoc@fao.org