KrishiVoc
KrishiVoc: Indian Agricultural Vocabulary
Preface
Information management plays an important role in the development of a nation. Role of information management cannot be overlooked in the field of agriculture as agriculture forms the backbone of Indian economy. Earlier, proper access to information had played a crucial role in the advancement of food security through the Green Revolution in India in the ’60 and ‘70s. In current times also, management of everyday generating wealth of agriculture knowledge and dissemination of knowledge to all stake holders of agriculture – farmers, scientists, educators and policy makers - can play an important role in the economic growth of the nation.
Digitization of information and web-based services has made information easily accessible to the majority of people. Further improvement in information accessibility by efficient and meaningful search, can be achieved only with the help of new web technologies. One such web technology -Semantic search, which requires semantic vocabulary, is used by many web-sites for the efficient information search. While working on agropedia-portal, agropedia group at IITK came up with the idea of creating a semantic vocabulary for agricultural terms (with focus on Indian agriculture) and named it “KrishiVoc”.
KrishiVoc is a compendium of agricultural terms/ concepts organized in hierarchical order under domain categories. Such vocabularies can be used for providing domain knowledge, for cataloguing and indexing documents, for inferencing, etc. At present, KrishiVoc covers 11 categories of agriculture and two more categoris – Plant Taxonomy and Synonym.
To create KrishiVoc many digital and non-digital sources have been consulted. This version of KrishiVoc has been validated by a team of ‘Experts’ of UAS, Raichur, whose invaluable contributions have been acknowledged by the authors.
The first version of KrishiVoc has been named as KrishiVoc 1.0 anticipating the revised versions in future. We sincerely request the readers to bring any mistake in this version to our notice.
Introduction
KrishiVoc is a comprehensive, standardized, structured and controlled vocabulary covering terminologies from all aspects of Indian agriculture. This is a maiden initiative to compile the terminologies of agriculture at one place. KrishiVoc encompasses concepts/terms of major facets of agriculture i.e., Crops, Plant production, Plant protection, Post harvest management, Agriculture economics, Agriculture Engineering, Agriculture extension, Crop Improvement etc. In addition, a separate list of synonyms has also been prepared which includes spelling and usage variants of terms, alternate names and acronyms. Till now, 39,000 concepts/terms have been compiled and arranged in hierarchal order under the following 13 broad heads:
- Agricultural Economics
- Agricultural Engineering
- Agricultural Extensions
- Biochemistry and Physiology
- Crop Improvement
- Crops
- Environmental Science
- Crop Production
- Plant Protection
- Post Harvest Management
- Soil Science and Soil Microbiology
- Taxonomy
- Synonyms
In short, KrishiVoc is a ONE STOP SOLUTION for ALL THE TERMS and CONCEPTS of INDIAN AGRICULTURE.
Acknowledgement
Authors are grateful to agri-experts of UAS-Raichur for their valuable contribution in terms of validating KrishiVoc. Authors sincerely acknowledge the help rendered by Dr. N. T. Yaduraju and Dr. Prabhuraj for their valuable contribution in bringing out the current version of KrishiVoc. The constant support and encouragement received from agropedia team is highly appreciated. Authors are thankful to all those who are directly or indirectly involved in the compilation of this document.