It was a very interesting and useful experience to attend the Thesaurus Working Group meeting. The meeting started with presentations of the following different thesauri from the EU,  describing the basic functionalities including the mapping techniques:

• The Eurovoc team presented their mapping tool.  The commercial mapping tool has very nice user interface but it’s maintenance is very expensive. It is based on concept-to- concept mapping technique.
• From FAO’s side, Gudrun Johannsen presented the VocBench, and the alignment technique of the AGROVOC LOD was presented by Ahsan Morshed. The participants showed an enormous interest, and would like to see the SKOS version of the VocBench as soon as possible.
• Christine Laaboudi proposed the two way mapping  idea (AGROVOC to EUROVOC, EUROVOC to AGROVOC) in order to analyze more mapping links. She will send a task list to the FAO team.
• The European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) presented another mapping tool called “SILK”. It is a very promising technique for the future:
• http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/silk/
• Axel Huckstorf from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs who presented the European Thesaurus on International Relations and Area Studies (http://www.ireon-portal.eu/index.php?id=91&L=1) would like to collaborate with us regarding SKOS conversion, and the VocBench.
• GEMET was presented by Søren Roug who showed the AGROVOC inlinks. GEMET also added DBpedia links. The idea to add DBpedia links also to AGROVOC was discussed with Søren.

Idea for future collaboration: Following discussions with the Eurovoc team, it could be a nice project idea to have Eurovoc on board of the Vocbench. As most of the small EU thesauri might be  merged with Eurovoc, all EU thesauri could be connected. In this way we could build a larger community.