At SemTech 2011 in San Francisco, the AIMS team presented the business case and community of practice for VocBench, its distributed, web-based ontology editing and management system.

VocBench is a web-based multi-lingual vocabulary management tool developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. It transforms thesauri, authority lists and glossaries into SKOS/RDF concept schemes for use in a linked data environment.It supports a growing set of user communities, including the global, distributed group of terminologists who manage AGROVOC, a multi-lingual agricultural thesaurus of 40,000 terms in over 20 languages.

VocBench also manages the workflow and editorial processes implied by vocabulary evolution such as user rights/roles, validation and versioning. In addition VocBench features a flexible set of auxiliary web services that permit other applications to interact with VocBench vocabularies using REST queries.

Developed in Java, it leverages the Google Web Toolkit to support a rich-client interface and is released under a GPL license. FAO seeks interested partners to broaden the community base and ensure long-term sustainability.

• What is VocBench?
• How does VocBench work (demo)?
• Who is the VocBench community?
• What are the current/future development plans for VocBench?
• What is the long-term sustainability of VocBench?

The presentation is available here.