  Knowledge organization systems (KOS), like thesauri and other controlled
vocabularies, are used to provide subject access to information systems across
the web. Due to the heterogeneity of these systems, mapping between
vocabularies becomes crucial for retrieving relevant information. However,
mapping thesauri is a laborious task, and thus big efforts are being made to
automate the mapping process. This paper examines two mapping approaches
involving the agricultural thesaurus AGROVOC, one machine-created and one human
created. We are addressing the basic question "What are the pros and cons of
human and automatic mapping and how can they complement each other?" By
pointing out the difficulties in specific cases or groups of cases and grouping
the sample into simple and difficult types of mappings, we show the limitations
of current automatic methods and come up with some basic recommendations on
what approach to use when.
