The NAL staff originally developed and funded NALT to meet the needs of the ARS of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
The thesaurus was rigorously reviewed and tested by ARS scientists and specialists throughout its early developments.
[1] NALT is mapped to resources such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings, CAB Thesaurus, AGROVOC and Wikidata.
[4] The thesaurus was made available as Linked Open Data in 2010, assigning persistent URI labels for preferred label concepts to create meaningful relationships between different information resources (such as Web pages, datasets and research articles).
[4] The “NALT For the Machine Age” (N4MA) initiative was launched in June 2020, transforming the thesaurus into a state-of-the-art multischeme “NALT Concept Space” which captures human conceptual knowledge in machine readable form.