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.

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.