An ontology is a way of structuring the meaning and relationship between words and terms in a specific discipline - such as aquatic food systems. Ontologies provide a common language for different kinds of data to be easily interpreted and interoperable allowing easier aggregation and analysis. 

Heterogeneous and multidisciplinary data are generated by research. This data is analysed and often integrated into predictive models for climate change or decision-making tools for fisheries management and aquaculture production. WorldFish and CGIAR research aims to improve the sustainability, productivity and resilience of aquatic food systems. Harmonising the labelling of aquatic foods data with controlled vocabularies will enable easier data aggregation, interpretation, and analysis.

The ontology has been categorised into small-scale fisheries and small-scale aquaculture categories. Some terms occur in both categories.

The Fisheries and Aquaculture ontology builds on fisheries and aquaculture terminology from the FAO Agrovoc and terminology used in WorldFish innovations such as PeskAAS and Lab-in-a-backpack. The fisheries ontology focuses on the concepts of small-small fisheries and small-scale aquaculture.

The mission of the OBO Foundry is to develop a family of interoperable ontologies for the biological sciences that are both logically well-formed and scientifically accurate. Therefore, some terms in the Aquatic ontology tree are generic, but necessarily so for Fisheries and Aquaculture ontology to be interoperable with other ontologies. In further efforts towards such interoperability, Aquatic ontology reuses and builds on existing terms from other ontologies such as Agrovoc, thus minimising term proliferation and duplication across multiple ontologies. 

Key Contributors (alphabetically)

The Small-Scale Fisheries and Aquaculture Ontology Working Group was formed in 2019 to compile, update and contribute fishery related terms to existing controlled vocabularies. The objective is to improve the WorldFish data interoperability into the various projects, databases and repositories by (a) addressing inconsistent use of fisheries and aquaculture related terms across the datasets, (b) highlighting the missing terms in the main semantic resources, and (c) connecting and collaborating with the CGIAR Community of Practice for Ontology. 

• https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7381034

We request that users cite the ontology using the following citation:

Small-Scale Fisheries and Aquaculture Ontology 2022. WorldFish and the Alliance of CIAT & Bioversity. Penang, Malaysia. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7381034

The small-scale fisheries and aquaculture ontology is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.