The 2014 edition of the CAB Thesaurus was published this summer (July 2014) by CABI, an inter-governmental, not-for-profit organization seeking to improve people’s lives worldwide by providing information and applying scientific expertise to solve problems in agriculture and the environment. This interesting news came to our attention by InfoDocket in their article, “Agriculture, Life Sciences, Health: Access New Edition of CAB Thesaurus Published Online.”
The new thesaurus has been integrated into all of CABI’s publishing processes. Changes since the previous edition (September 2012) include the following:
- All 1300 full datasheets in the Aquaculture Compendium were reviewed and missing species, diseases names, etc. were added.
- Reptiles were completely reviewed and many species added and taxonomy corrected.
- All plant disease common names have been standardized as used in the Crop Protection Compendium.
- Sample data files for download were updated. The full thesaurus files are available in several formats on request.
- The total number of terms has grown by 5.7% to 264,518. The CAB Thesaurus is available in eleven languages.
The next edition of the thesaurus is planned for early 2016. Despite the many upgrades in this latest version, many more are in the works for the next edition. Perhaps the most important of these is publishing the thesaurus as Linked Open Data.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.
