The AGROVOC Thesaurus was developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Commission of the European Communities (CEC), in the early 1980s. AGROVOC is the foundation that underpins the development of the Concept Server (CS) project. Using the knowledge contained in vocabulary systems and thesauri such as AGROVOC, the CS will be able to develop specialized domain-specific terminologies and concepts that will better support information management in the Web environment. A key objective is to add more semantics to the thesaurus, for example, by expanding and better specifying the relationships between concepts. 

In light of new developments and the need to understand the user requirements, FAO is organizing an AGROVOC E-Conference. The outcomes of the conference will be discussed in the Eighth Agricultural Ontology Service Workshop to be held in September of this year. 

The aim of this conference is to bring AGROVOC users together to share what they would like to see improved in AGROVOC and the direction it should take. The E-Conference will allow people from all the different corners of the world, who otherwise might not be able to travel to regular meetings on AGROVOC, to voice their ideas and thoughts for the betterment of AGROVOC. The ultimate goal of the conference is to assess the direction the work on development of AGROVOC as a thesaurus and a concept server should take.