Global Agricultural Concept Scheme (GACS)

The Global Agricultural Concept Scheme (GACS) is a hub for thesauri in the agricultural field, in multiple languages, for use in Linked Data. The idea for GACS emerged out of discussions at the World Congress of IAALD, the International Association of Agricultural Information Specialists, in July 2013. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), CAB International (CABI), and the National Agricultural Library of the USA (NAL) agreed in October 2013 to explore the feasibility of developing a shared concept scheme by integrating their three thesauri: the AGROVOC Concept Scheme, the CAB Thesaurus (CABT), and NAL Thesaurus (NALT). In the GACS vision, the integration of these three thesauri is but the first step towards the realization of a hub that links to and from the concept schemes beyond the initial three, and in multiple language areas. The GACS Beta (http://tester-os-kktest.lib.helsinki.fi/gacsdemo/gacs/en/) was created from a selection of circa 10,000 frequently used concepts each from AGROVOC, CABT, and NALT. The poster presents a visualization of GACS Alpha 3 as it was in April 2015.