Agricultural Ontology Service

The Agricultural Ontology Service ( AOS) ( German: Agricultural Ontology Service) is a project of the Food and Agriculture Organization ( FAO), which was started in 2000.

The goal of this project is the development of ontologies from existing agricultural classification systems such as thesauri and taxonomies. The application of such standards should lead to a better indexing and retrieval of bibliographic resources on agricultural topics. This is a more effective interaction between the partners involved in this field allows. The developed ontological relationships help especially in the avoidance of multiple searches.

In the agricultural sector there are several vocabularies such as the AGROVOC Thesaurus FAO, the CAB thesaurus and the National Agricultural Library Thesaurus in the United States. These are to be merged by the Agricultural Ontology Service. The formal description language Web Ontology Language is assumed.