Abstract. In the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the need to revamp its popular agriculture vocabulary AGROVOC using Semantic Web knowledge representation standards combined with the need to provide a collaborative environment for development and maintenance purposes, pushed forward the realization of a dedicated AGROVOC thesaurus maintenance tool. With the progressive standardization of the AGROVOC knowledge model, following recent Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) recommendations by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and with the addition of more FAO-maintained vocabularies, the former “AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench” has become a general-purpose framework for thesauri and vocabulary development and is now reborn as “ VocBench”. In this paper, we describe the path which led to its realization and its main features