The Global Agricultural Concept Scheme (GACS) is a SKOS concept scheme with concepts and related terms used in the field of agriculture, broadly defined. As a SKOS concept scheme, GACS identifies its concepts with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) for use in Linked Data. GACS Beta 3.1, published in May 2016 with 15,000 concepts and 350,000 terms (labels) in over 25 languages, will soon be superseded by GACS 4.0, the result of a recent GACS Quality Improvement Project.
Created since 2014 on the initiative of three organizations, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International (CABI), and the USDA National Agricultural Library (NAL), GACS was formed at the intersection of most-frequently-used concepts from their three respective thesauri -- the AGROVOC Concept Scheme, CAB Thesaurus, and the NAL Thesaurus, for which GACS provides a mapping hub.
GACS is seen as an important step towards linking and integrating agricultural data of all types to address the long-term challenge of global food security. The GACS community of maintenance organizations is growing. The GACS community aspires to build collaboration with expert providers of concept URIs in specific areas such as species, viruses, chemicals, and geographic places.