PrIn 2021, FAO and CGIAR established a collaboration to improve food and agriculture data exchange through the use and enhancement of the AGROVOC thesaurus, a controlled multilingual vocabulary covering terminology related to FAO's areas of interest. AGROVOC is a valuable tool to classify data homogeneously, facilitate interoperability and reuse. It can facilitate the collection, storage and use of agronomic data, allowing easy and reuse of data by humans and machines. Since 2022 the CGIAR manages a Working Group co-chaired by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT that defines the framework for CGIAR collaboration to enrich AGROVOC. In addition to organising the presentation of CGIAR concepts, AGROVOC provides semantically organised terms from the field of agronomy. This webinar will present the results of the CGIAR working group on AGROVOC and outline the benefits and results of this collaboration to date. The 3 presentations are:
# 1. 00:00 "Results of the collaboration between CGIAR and FAO in the context of the AGROVOC Thesaurus” - Imma Subirats-Coll and Kristin Kolshus, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation”
- Imma Subirats-Coll is a senior information management officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. She leads the AGROVOC, AGRIS and AGORA programmes with the objective to enhance accessibility and visibility to knowledge, information and data produced by FAO members.
- Kristin Kolshus is an information management officer in the FAO Partnerships and UN Collaboration Division. Her work focuses on information management and access to scientific information. She is an agronomist and is the curator of AGROVOC thesaurus, a multilingual, collaborative thesaurus for agricultural concepts.
# 2. 10:00 “Benefits and results of the Collaboration between FAO-AGROVOC and CGIAR from CGIAR perspective “ - Sara Jani and Data Management Officer, The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas - Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning team (ICARDA-MEL)
- Sara Jani is the Knowledge Management Coordinator at The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas within the Knowledge Management sub-team of the Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning team. She is responsible for the quality assurance and management of ICARDA knowledge products, project registration, and coordinating the contribution of the ICARDA & CGIAR curator team to the FAO-managed AGROVOC
- Asma Jeitani is a Data Management Officer at ICARDA within the Data Management sub-team of the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning team. Her work has mainly included data curation, configuration of projects on MEL, support the annual reporting of CGIAR initiative, and is a member of the CGIAR-AGROVOC curation team.
# 3. 23:24 “Describing CGIAR Digital Outputs with AGROVOC” - Alan Orth, Systems Analyst, Data and Research Methods, International Livestock Research Institute
-Alan Orth has a background in computer science with a specialty in Linux systems administration. He has been working in research support at ILRI in Kenya since 2009. He discusses the use of AGROVOC as one of the standard vocabularies used to describe CGIAR digital outputs in major CGIAR repositories.