Geomatic Concepts in Agriculture Thesauri

The agriculture thesauri (e.g. AGROVOC or NAL Agriculture Thesaurus) represent very large and robust systems of formalized knowledge. They are primarily focused on information related to agriculture. But they also use fragments of geomatic information and knowledge in a form of concepts and their terms. These concepts include general terms of all parts of geomatics as well as data instances (such as particular methods). Even though these concepts are not the main component of above-mentioned thesauri, the concepts from geomatic domain play very important role in a process of detail description of agricultural and other concepts (including processes of their measurement, observation or mapping) contained in thesauri. This paper assess geomatic concepts in AGROVOC and NAL Agriculture Thesaurus from the view of geomatics (but with a respect to methodologies of thesauri development and maintenance). It means evaluation of the subset of concepts related to geomatics and close scientific disciplines such as cartography, photogrammetry, GIS science or remote sensing. Authors look into definitions of concepts, their hierarchy, relations and links to other information resources. As the result there is a short list of recommendations how to improve and enrich the above-mentioned thesauri from the view of concepts from geomatic domain. It can enhance the quality of thesauri and their information value. The paper introduces the fundamental terminology (terms thesaurus, geomatics and concept) and related researches. Then a description of mapping of concepts in particular tools follows. The results of mapping are summarized in the part focused on the most frequent imperfections. The last section (with the exception of the final conclusion) presents the set of recommendations concerning usage of concepts from geomatic domain in agricultural thesauri.