Chinese Agricultural Thesaurus (CAT) is the largest agricultural domain thesaurus in China, which is held and maintained by AII of CAAS. CAT was the important fruits of more than 100 professionals’ six years hard work. The international and national standards were adopted while designing and constructing CAT. CAT covers areas including agriculture, forestry, biology, etc. It is organized in 40 main categories and contains more than 63 thousands concepts and most of them have English translation. In addition, CAT includes more than 130 thousands semantic relationships such as Use, UF, BT, NT and RT.

CAT is now available as a Linked Data set published. The Linked Data version of CAT is in RDF/SKOS-XL, and is stored in Virtuoso triple store. Data is accessible to machines through a SPARQL endopoint, and to humans by means of a HTML pages generated with Virtuoso. From 2005, AII cooperated with FAO, started the CAT to AGROVOC mapping work, conforming to the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) mapping rules (skos: exactMatch, broadMatch and narrowMatch were mainly considered and applied). In addition, CAT has also been mapped to EUROVOC, NALT, LCSH automatically just based on the label string exact match. These mapping results could lay fundamental bases for higher level interoperability (e.g. cross-lingual information retrieval and knowledge discovery applications).

Some Examples

• http://cat.aii.caas.cn/category/60
• http://cat.aii.caas.cn/concept/42359

Sparql Query Endpoint

CAT is accessible using SPARQL (Simple Protocol and RDF Query Language), an SQL-like query language typically used to extract RDF triples from triple-stores:

• CAT Sparql Query Interface