The AGROVOC Thesaurus has been developed by FAO and the Commission of the European Communities in the early 1980s and is used by AGRISandCARISinformation systems of FAO for indexing (associating the descriptors appropriate to the content of the documents referred) and retrieval since 1986.
It is a multilingual structured and controlled vocabulary designed to cover the terminology of all subject fields of agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food and related domains (e.g. environment) in order to describe the documents in a controlled system language.
The last edition of AGROVOC (Third Edition, Version 1997) contains over 46000 terms (key words), of which 16105 base descriptors (English), 9480 English synonyms, 8693 French synonyms and 12086 Spanish synonyms. Supplements to AGROVOC are produced yearly.
Different hierarchical and associative relations (broader/narrower terms, related terms, equivalent terms, combination use) are established between the terms of AGROVOC.
The AGROVOC Thesaurus may be obtained from FAO's sale offices (printed form) and AGRIS Processing Unit Vienna (electronic forms, FTP Server) and may be used on-line (FAO's Web Server, WAICENT).
Click here to browse on-line the AGROVOC Thesaurus.