AFO is suited for content description in subjects such as agriculture, foresty, food, enviroment, game and fisheries, and biology.  

AFO is available in English

The ontology has over 5000 concepts and in includes also the concepts of the Finnish General Ontology because they are interlinked and the upper hierarchy of AFO is based on YSO concepts.  The ontology has also group concepts (for hierarchical and part-of purposes) and these should not be used  for content description.

Each AFO-concept has only one preferred label per language and concepts may have one or several entry terms.   Many AFO concepts have links to the YSO - General Finnish ontology. We hope to have links to AGROVOC Multilingual Thesaurus at a later date.

The ontology is maintaned collectively by and editorial group which has representative from the Natural Resources Institute Finland, Finnish Environment Institute and the University of Helsinki Library and the Natural History Museum of Finland. The latest updates of the ontology in 2017 have been created with the assistance of the Finnish Terminology Center TSK.

AFO is based in the Agriforest thesaurus which was developed by the Viikki Science Library of University of Helsinki and was maintained until 2014.  The AFO-ontology was originally developed in the FinnONTO research project (2003-2012) of the Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo) in Aalto University and the University of Helsinki.