Agriculture, Life Sciences, Health: Access New Edition of CAB Thesaurus Published Online
The 2014 edition of the CAB Thesaurus, which covers agriculture, life sciences, human health, and related subjects, was published earlier this summer (July 2014).
The web site at htp://www.cabi.org/cabthesaurus/ has been updated and the new thesaurus has been integrated in all of CABI’s publishing processes.
CABI is an inter-governmental, not-for-profit organization. Our mission is to improve people’s lives worldwide by providing information and applying scientific expertise to solve problems in agriculture and the environment.
The following lists some of the changes since the previous edition was published in September 2012:
All 1300 full datasheets in the Aquaculture Compendium were reviewed and missing species, diseases names, etc. were added.
Reptiles were completely reviewed and many species added and taxonomy corrected.
Complete revision of Miridae, plant bugs, which are important plant pests.
Chromista have been incorporated; many higher level taxa have been moved about, changed or added accordingly.
All plant disease common names have been standardized as used in the Crop Protection Compendium.
Revised all algae, which hadn’t been tackled in many years. Many new species have been added and taxonomy fixed according to AlgaeBase.
Fixed chemical hierarchies to correct inconsistencies.
Improved the SKOS output.
Updated sample data files for download. The full thesaurus files are available in several formats on request.
The total number of terms has grown by 5.7% to 264,518. The CAB Thesaurus is available in eleven languages.
There are many individual changes to taxonomy of scientific names, and many terms have been added according to user requests.
The next edition of the thesaurus is planned for early 2016. Many things are on the agenda, the most important of which include publishing the thesaurus as Linked Open Data, revising plant hierarchies according to the APG III system, adding outstanding species from the MEDANI (Medical and Veterinary Arthropod Name Index) database, expanding coverage of vector-borne diseases, and restoring the structure of the classified thesaurus last published in 1999 in addition to the current thesaurus structure.
Direct to CAB Thesaurus 2014
Filed under: Data Files, News, Publishing

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.