VocBench 3

An open-source platform to help managing and publishing multilingual controlled vocabularies in an open and interoperable way

VocBench 3 is a free web-based platform facilitating collaborative editing and management of authority lists, taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies. It is designed to meet the needs of the semantic web and made available as an open source solution.

Fully compliant with W3C standards, it is a perfect platform for the evolution of many organizations and authorities towards production and publication of Linked Open Data. VocBench 3 development has been driven by the feedback gathered from its expanding community of users (among them: EU/national/regional public services, research centres, universities, companies and independent users).

A new version (4.0) of the platform has been released funded by the ISA² programme in September 2018.

The new and more user-friendly version includes the easier editing of thesauri and dedicated support for ontologies, thesauri and Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) standards, OntoLex-Lemon lexicons and any sort of RDF dataset. Additionally, VocBench 3 v.4.0 enables importing and exporting data in various formats (any XML-based data format, RDF, Turtle, JSON) and allows converting an Excel file into RDF triples by using the built-in Sheet2RDF tool.

Collaborative work on controlled vocabularies – what for?

Further to essential collaborative features (multi-user management, role definition, control of access), VocBench 3 provides a collaboration mechanism which allows users:

• To link any RDF resource inside a project loaded into VocBench 3 to a collaboration platform such as JIRA,
• To co-manage and co-maintain various controlled vocabularies, based on differentiated access rights and authorisations.

A change-tracking mechanism is implemented in the history feature and it grants collaborative editing in the integrated validation workflow.

What is next? A new release is expected to be made available to the public in September 2019.

At the VocBench 3 stand you can find out more about this platform, explore it and discover its features through real examples of controlled vocabularies managed with it and discuss directly with people involved in the creation and maintenance of such vocabularies.