A very eventful month for AGROVOC team at ICRISAT

Ms. Gudrun Johannsen's visit to ICRISAT made the month very eventful for ICRISAT's AGROVOC team. Gudrun Johannsen - Senior Information Specialist, FAO, has been working on the AGROVOC Thesaurus since 1990, and also participated in its translation into German. Currently she is responsible for the content management of AGROVOC.

Ms. Gudrun has been at ICRISAT to guide the team in finalizing the BT/NT relationships, particularly the genetics and plant breeding terms. She has been adding useful information resources to an already long list of thesauri including the NAL thesaurus, GEMET thesaurus,the Biocomplexity thesaurus, FAOTERM, the MeSH browser and the all inclusive World Bank Thesaurus. (It never denies!)



We see her going patiently and passionately through each of the resources till she finds a convincing definition or explanation. It was an inspiring and instructional interaction for us and this would not have been possible through e-mails or skype conferences.

A non-descriptor to a non-descriptor?!

In theory, it may not be acceptable! But in practice, we feel that it is very much required, particularly in the case of spelling variants.

Semantic relationships

The most common types of semantic relationships among terms are:

the equivalence relationship,
the hierarchical relationship and
the associative relationship

and there are three kinds of hierarchical relationships:

Generic relationship
Instance relationship
Whole-part relationship

The `Whole-part' relationship is between terms where one concept is inherently included in another. Four major types of this relationship occur:
systems and organs of the body,
geographic locations,
disciplines or fields of discourse, and
hierarchical organizational, corporate, social or political structures.

(Source: Consumer Egg Thesaurus - http://www.slais.ubc.ca/COURSES/libr512/01-02-wt2/thesauri/Eggs/structure.htm)

New Top Terms

`Strategies' and `Systems' are the new top terms proposed. Addition of `Events' as another Top Term is also being considered. Already `Phenomena' and `Resources' were added to the initial list of Top Terms. It was decided to keep `Technology' as a separate top term. Now, we find that it is a top term in the subjects listing of `Knowledge 2008' portal as well. (http://www.success.co.il/knowledge/encyclopedia/index.html)

The Discovery of an Information Resource

Yesterday, Lavanya came running to share the joy of discovering `Definitions.net' with us. We were surprised at not stumbling upon that site earlier. Did WE really miss it? Or IT missed us? Or is it a damn new site and we were among the early birds? We were excited! We even left a message to them, waiting to receive a reply. Today, there was a message in Ms. Lavanya's mail box!


We understand that it is not a totally new resource, but that it is STANDS4 that has morphed into Abbreviations.com. "Abbreviations.com is a unique reference resource which focuses entirely on definitions and classifications of short hands such as acronyms, abbreviations and initialisms. It is backed up by a large community of volunteering editors and it provides its users with a diverse disciplines directory, a state of the art meta-search engine and free desktop search tools."



We are particularly happy with the elegant design and lay out of the site. I was quickly scrolling down to see the pictures that our word in question has pulled in. I make a visual guess and very often I find images that are quite close to my guess! It is indeed a very handy tool while adding pictures to messages and presentations.


We were very happy to find some good definitions and I was double happy when I didn't find something, as there is a `Get a Free T-Shirt Offer' on becoming an editor!