National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary
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The National Agricultural Library Thesaurus (NALT) Concept Space is a
controlled vocabulary Control may refer to: Basic meanings Economics and business * Control (management), an element of management * Control, an element of management accounting * Comptroller (or controller), a senior financial officer in an organization * Controllin ...
of terms related to agricultural, biological, physical and social sciences. NALT is used by the
National Agricultural Library The United States National Agricultural Library (NAL) is one of the world's largest agricultural research libraries, and serves as a national library of the United States and as the library of the United States Department of Agriculture. Located ...
(NAL) to annotate peer reviewed journal articles for NAL’s bibliographic citation database,
AGRICOLA Agricola, the Latin word for farmer, may also refer to: People Cognomen or given name :''In chronological order'' * Gnaeus Julius Agricola (40–93), Roman governor of Britannia (AD 77–85) * Sextus Calpurnius Agricola, Roman governor of the mi ...
, PubAg, and Ag Data Commons. The Food Safety Research Information Office (FSRIO) and Agriculture Network Information Center (AgNIC) also use the NALT as the indexing vocabulary for their information systems. In addition, the NALT is used as an aid for locating information at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and the Economic Research Service (ERS) web sites and databases.


Historical overview

The NAL staff originally developed and funded NALT to meet the needs of the ARS of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). NALT referenced databases such as the
AlgaeBase AlgaeBase is a global species database of information on all groups of algae, both marine and freshwater, as well as sea-grass. History AlgaeBase began in March 1996, founded by Michael Guiry. Text was copied from this source, which is avail ...
, BioTech life science dictionary,
Cambridge dictionary The ''Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary'' (abbreviated ''CALD'') was first published in 1995 under the name ''Cambridge International Dictionary of English'', by the Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press is the ...
,
Index Fungorum ''Index Fungorum'' is an international project to index all formal names (scientific names) in the fungus kingdom. the project is based at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, one of three partners along with Landcare Research and the Institute of M ...
,
NCBI Taxonomy Database The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is part of the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is approved and funded by the government of the United States. The ...
and
Integrated Taxonomic Information System The Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) is an American partnership of federal agencies designed to provide consistent and reliable information on the taxonomy of biological species. ITIS was originally formed in 1996 as an interagenc ...
in its formation. The thesaurus was rigorously reviewed and tested by ARS scientists and specialists throughout its early developments. The first edition was published by the National Agricultural Library on January 1, 2002. Since May 2007, NALT has been available in English and Spanish in cooperation with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), as well as other Latin American agricultural institutions belonging to the Agriculture Information and Documentation Service of the Americas (SIDALC). NALT is mapped to resources such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings, CAB Thesaurus, AGROVOC and Wikidata. NALT, along with the two other major agricultural thesauri, AGROVOC and CAB-Thesaurus, make up the Global Agricultural Concept Space (GACS), which was the first known concept space formed in March 2014. NALT has been endorsed by AGNIC, Research Data Alliance Wheat Data Interoperability Group (RDA WDI) and the Alliance on Agricultural Information and Documentation Services (SIDALC).


Technical advances

The thesaurus was made available as
Linked Open Data In computing, linked data (often capitalized as Linked Data) is structured data which is interlinked with other data so it becomes more useful through semantic queries. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but r ...
in 2010, assigning persistent URI labels for preferred label concepts to create meaningful relationships between different information resources (such as Web pages, datasets and research articles). These URIs are required for NALT concepts to be used as a global metadata reference, enabling aggregation of content so that related content could be located more efficiently. Its knowledge graph, a
SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a W3C recommendation designed for representation of thesauri, classification schemes, taxonomies, subject-heading systems, or any other type of structured controlled vocabulary. SKOS is part of the ...
concept scheme, enables these data mappings.   The “NALT For the Machine Age” (N4MA) initiative was launched in June 2020, transforming the thesaurus into a state-of-the-art multischeme “NALT Concept Space” which captures human conceptual knowledge in machine readable form. This data standard is inspired by GACS and expands on the preexisting hierarchical structure of a thesaurus by creating alternative hierarchical arrangements in sub-schemes within the overall hierarchy. The N4MA vision is to use NALT and other semantic innovations to normalize and connect agricultural data, allowing for machine integration and increased automation to manage and advance agricultural research. An alternative hierarchical arrangement has since been created though structural features “NALT Core” and “NALT Full”. The NALT Core is a trim NALT subscheme with 13,791 frequently used agricultural concepts, including 4,396 agriculturally important organisms (taxa) and structural updates. The NALT Full is a more granular knowledge base, containing the NALT Core in addition to 48,000 additional agricultural related organisms (taxa), in addition to several thousand less frequently used concepts for a total of 76,933 concepts. There are 11 concept types (Organism, Chemical, Product, Geographical, Topic) which express the most salient features of the concept space. # Animals, Livestock, One Health # Economics, Trade, Law, Business, Industry # Farms, Agricultural Production Systems # Fields of Study # Forestry, Wildland Management # Geographical Locations # Human Nutrition, Food Safety and Quality # Natural Resources, Conservation, Environment # Plant Production, Gardening # Research, Technology, Methods # Rural Development, Communities, Education, Extension


Availability

NALT schemes are available for download, as published and maintained by NAL. The Thesaurus and Glossary can be downloaded in three editions of SKOS: RDF-XML, RDF-Ntriples and RDF-Turtle.{{Cite web , title=Download Files {{! NAL Agricultural Thesaurus , url=https://agclass.nal.usda.gov/download-files , access-date=2022-06-16 , website=agclass.nal.usda.gov The U.S. Government waives copyright and related rights in this work worldwide through the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, allowing for it to be in the nation’s public domain.


References


External links


Download of NALT schemes

Global Agricultural Concept Space

Research Data Alliance Wheat Data Interoperability Group

Alliance on Agricultural Information and Documentation Services
United States National Agricultural Library Thesauri