VocBench is a web-based, multilingual, editing and workflow tool that manages thesauri, authority lists and glossaries using SKOS. Developed by FAO and its partners, VocBench is designed to meet the needs of semantic web and linked data environments. VocBench provides tools and functionalities that facilitate both collaborative editing and multilingual terminology. It also includes administration and group management features that permit flexible roles for maintenance, validation and quality assurance.

The VocBench community is growing and today includes FAO’s Fisheries and Aquaculture Department and the data.fao.org project, the European Commission Publications Office and the European Environment Agency. FAO’s instance of VocBench kindly hosted by FAO Centre of Excellence MIMOS Berhad currently manages the AGROVOC thesaurus, the Biotechnology Glossary and other bibliographic metadata.

The latest production release is VocBench 1.3.1 which can be downloaded here (please note that it is not particularly easy to install and that we do not provide support of any kind.) The team is currently completing a major rewrite that shares services with University of Rome at Tor Vergata’s Semantic Turkey, a Mozilla plugin for semantic annotation and ontology enrichment. This version (2.0) will be released in the spring of 2013 and features many improvements such as native SKOS support, support for multiple triple-stores and OSGi compliance.

To explore VocBench functionalities please play in our Sandbox. Editor functionalities can be tested by using the guest login. To test advanced VocBench functionalities please contact us.