National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary

National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary (NALT)^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4] is a comprehensive controlled vocabulary for the purpose of indexing journal articles, books and data in agriculture, biology and related disciplines. It serves as a thesaurus that facilitates searching. Originally created in English in 2002 and in Spanish in 2007, and updated annually by the National Agricultural Library (NAL), it is used by AGRICOLA, PubAg and other databases.

The thesaurus contains over 255,390 terms, including 148,282 descriptors in English and Spanish. It is organized into 17 Subject Categories to facilitate browsing the vocabulary:

Animal Science and Animal Products
Biological Sciences
Breeding and Genetic Improvement
Economics, Business and Industry
Farms and Farming Systems
Food and Human Nutrition
Forest Science and Forest Products
Geographical Locations
Government, Law and Regulations
Health and Pathology
Insects and Entomology
Natural Resources, Earth and Environment
Physical and Chemical Sciences
Plant Science and Plant Products
Research, Technology and Engineering
Rural and Agricultural Sociology
Taxonomic Classification of Organisms

References[]

^ Alonso, Y. (2004). The National Agricultural Library: providing tools for education and development in agriculture. World Library and Information Congress: 70th IFLA General Conference and Council, 22-27 August 2004, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Retrieved from https://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla70/papers/110e-Alonso.pdf
^ Bartol, T. (2009) Assessment of Food and Nutrition Related Descriptors in Agricultural and Biomedical Thesauri. In: Sartori F., Sicilia M.Á., Manouselis N. (eds) Metadata and Semantic Research. MTSR 2009. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 46. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-04590-5_28
^ Lauser, B., Johannsen, G., Caracciolo, C., Keizer, J., van Hage, W. R., Mayr, P. (2008). Comparing human and automatic thesaurus mapping approaches in the agricultural domain. Proc. Int’l Conf. on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0808/0808.2246.pdf
^ Straus, C., and Gardner, M. (2006). Implementing the NAL Thesaurus in a Knowledge Repository (KR). Retrieved from https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/39514

[1] Alonso, Y. (2004). The National Agricultural Library: providing tools for education and development in agriculture. World Library and Information Congress: 70th IFLA General Conference and Council, 22-27 August 2004, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Retrieved from https://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla70/papers/110e-Alonso.pdf

[2] Bartol, T. (2009) Assessment of Food and Nutrition Related Descriptors in Agricultural and Biomedical Thesauri. In: Sartori F., Sicilia M.Á., Manouselis N. (eds) Metadata and Semantic Research. MTSR 2009. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 46. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-04590-5_28

[3] Lauser, B., Johannsen, G., Caracciolo, C., Keizer, J., van Hage, W. R., Mayr, P. (2008). Comparing human and automatic thesaurus mapping approaches in the agricultural domain. Proc. Int’l Conf. on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0808/0808.2246.pdf

[4] Straus, C., and Gardner, M. (2006). Implementing the NAL Thesaurus in a Knowledge Repository (KR). Retrieved from https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/39514

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