Turning a Legacy Thesaurus into a Strategic Knowledge Asset

The Challenge

CABI is a global non-profit dedicated to addressing critical challenges in agriculture and the environment, from combating pests and invasive species to promoting sustainable practices like biocontrols. A cornerstone of their mission is knowledge sharing, delivered through collaborative projects, scientific publishing, and data services.

Their CABI Digital Library hosts CAB Abstracts, a flagship database with over 15 million research records, expanding by 500,000 entries each year.

To make this vast content searchable and accessible, CABI relies on its Thesaurus, a multilingual taxonomy which, as of early 2023, included 160K+ concepts, 30K descriptors, and 1K+ geographic terms, all crucial for tagging, indexing, and search.

But despite its foundational role, the Thesaurus had become a bottleneck: It was managed through outdated software, limited to a single user, and lacked the structural integrity and flexibility needed for modern use cases like faceted search, linked data integration, and AI readiness.

When Gary Leicester joined as Content Metadata Controller in 2022, his immediate challenge was to convert the Thesaurus into SKOS. But this revealed deep structural issues, including tangled hierarchies and outdated data, that blocked progress.

The Solution

To modernize its thesaurus and make it future-ready, CABI implemented PoolParty Semantic Suite. This marked a shift from siloed, manual processes to a collaborative, API-first approach to metadata management.

By leveraging a PoolParty free trial and internal tools, the team conducted a thorough cleanup of over 160K+ concepts — resolving inconsistencies, validating structure, and preparing the data for use in SKOS.

PoolParty’s quality checking tools helped ensure structural integrity while allowing continuous iteration to meet internal and external reporting standards.

Concepts were classified into meaningful categories—such as crops, invasive species, pathogens, and geographies—making the thesaurus more useful across departments and product lines.

Perhaps most critically, CABI replaced single-user workflows with shared governance and streamlined publishing pipelines—laying the foundation for scalable, multi-user collaboration.

The Impact

In just one year, CABI fully transformed its thesaurus from a static legacy tool into a dynamic, reusable knowledge asset. 600,000+ new relationships were integrated, laying the groundwork for smarter data access, enhanced automation, and broader reuse across editorial, product, and research teams.

Thanks to PoolParty, previously manual processes became fully automated. Non-technical users can now extract structured, tabular datasets from the CABI Compendium without IT involvement via a simple, PoolParty-integrated form.

PoolParty’s API-first design also powers real-time synchronization between the Thesaurus and 80,000+ datasheets, eliminating bottlenecks and accelerating delivery of high-value information. Built-in quality assurance tools allow the team to continuously refile and align data for internal use, external sales, and AI-readiness.

Today, the Thesaurus is a central strategic resource and soon, CABI will launch a modern public-facing UI to replace the outdated thesaurus site. This transformation is just the beginning of CABI’s broader vision to leverage semantic technologies for better discovery, stronger data products, and greater global impact.