On 15 June 2011, the 1st meeting of the Collaborative Thesauri Working Group in Knowledge Organization, organized by the EU Publications Office, took place in Luxembourg.

The Thesaurus Working Group is focusing on a meta-thesaurus project made of interlinked specialized thesauri articulated around EuroVoc, EU’s multilingual, multidisciplinary thesaurus, as the generic umbrella. Prerequisite for the project will be to convert the vocabulary in SKOS/RDF and offer open access to the metadata.

Presentations on different alignment techniques and tools as well as discussions about different ways to improve the interoperability between thesauri and access to multilingual information via automatic indexing tools and use of metadata in a semantic web were part of the meeting. The alignment technique of AGROVOC Linked Open Data (LOD) and the VocBench, a tool to manage AGROVOC and other knowledge organisation systems, were presented from FAO’s side. The participants showed high interest in the VocBench. Possibilities on future collaboration between AGROVOC and EuroVocwere discussed.