science

National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary

National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary rather than just read about it. In short: The National Agricultural Library Thesaurus Concept Space (abbreviated NALT) is a controlled vocabulary of terms related to agricultural, biological, physical and social sciences. NALT is used by the National Agricultural Library (NAL) to annotate peer reviewed journal articles for NAL’s bibliographic citation database, AGRICOLA, PubAg, and Ag Data Commons.

Key takeaways

National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The National Agricultural Library Thesaurus Concept Space (abbreviated NALT) is a controlled vocabulary of terms related to agricultural, biological, physical and social sciences. NALT is used by the National Agricultural Library (NAL) to annotate peer reviewed journal articles for NAL’s bibliographic citation database, AGRICOLA, PubAg, and Ag Data Commons. The Food Safety Research Information Office (FSRIO) and Agriculture Network Information Center (AgNIC) also use the NALT as the indexing vocabulary for their information systems. In addition, the NALT is used as an aid for locating information at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and the Economic Research Service (ERS) web sites and databases.

Historical overview The NAL staff originally developed and funded NALT to meet the needs of the ARS of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). NALT referenced databases such as the AlgaeBase, BioTech life science dictionary, Cambridge dictionary, Index Fungorum, NCBI Taxonomy Database and Integrated Taxonomic Information System in its formation. The thesaurus was rigorously reviewed and tested by ARS scientists and specialists throughout its early developments. The first edition was published by the National Agricultural Library on January 1, 2002. Since May 2007, NALT has been available in English and Spanish in cooperation with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), as well as other Latin American agricultural institutions belonging to the Agriculture Information and Documentation Service of the Americas (SIDALC). NALT is mapped to resources such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings, CAB Thesaurus, AGROVOC and Wikidata. NALT, along with the two other major agricultural thesauri, AGROVOC and CAB-Thesaurus, make up the Global Agricultural Concept Space (GACS), which was the first known concept space formed in March 2014. NALT has been endorsed by AGNIC, Research Data Alliance Wheat Data Interoperability Group (RDA WDI) and the Alliance on Agricultural Information and Documentation Services (SIDALC).

Technical advances The thesaurus was made available as Linked Open Data in 2010, assigning persistent URI labels for preferred label concepts to create meaningful relationships between different information resources (such as Web pages, datasets and research articles). These URIs are required for NALT concepts to be used as a global metadata reference, enabling aggregation of content so that related content could be located more efficiently. Its knowledge graph, a SKOS concept scheme, enables these data mappings. The "NALT For the Machine Age" (N4MA) initiative was launched in June 2020, transforming the thesaurus into a state-of-the-art multischeme "NALT Concept Space" which captures human conceptual knowledge in machine readable form. This data standard is inspired by GACS and expands on the preexisting hierarchical structure of a thesaurus by creating alternative hierarchical arrangements in sub-schemes within the overall hierarchy. The N4MA vision is to use NALT and other semantic innovations to normalize and connect agricultural data, allowing for machine integration and increased automation to manage and advance agricultural research. An alternative hierarchical arrangement has since been created though structural features "NALT Core" and "NALT Full". The NALT Core is a trim NALT subscheme with 13,791 frequently used agricultural concepts, including 4,396 agriculturally important organisms (taxa) and structural updates. The NALT Full is a more granular knowledge base, containing the NALT Core in addition to 48,000 additional agricultural related organisms (taxa), in addition to several thousand less frequently used concepts for a total of 76,933 concepts. There are 11 concept types (Organism, Chemical, Product, Geographical, Topic) which express the most salient features of the concept space.

Animals, Livestock, One Health Economics, Trade, Law, Business, Industry Farms, Agricultural Production Systems Fields of Study Forestry, Wildland Management Geographical Locations Human Nutrition, Food Safety and Quality Natural Resources, Conservation, Environment Plant Production, Gardening Research, Technology, Methods Rural Development, Communities, Education, Extension

Availability NALT schemes are available for download, as published and maintained by NAL. The Thesaurus and Glossary can be downloaded in three editions of SKOS: RDF-XML, RDF-Ntriples and RDF-Turtle. The U.S. Government waives copyright and related rights in this work worldwide through the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, allowing for it to be in the nation’s public domain.

References

External links Download of NALT schemes Global Agricultural Concept Space Research Data Alliance Wheat Data Interoperability Group Alliance on Agricultural Information and Documentation Services

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary

In research: National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Thesauri (information retrieval), United States National Agricultural Library, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

Ask Teacher Smith questions about this articleOpens your AI tutor with a question about “National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary” →

Affiliate

Preply — study more efficiently by working with a personal tutor. 50% off.

How to study National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary in simple terms?

Why does National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary.