VocBench 3 helps managing multilingual controlled vocabularies in an interoperable way

While authority lists, taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies are increasingly used to drive data, content and information processes, a free web-based platform facilitating their collaborative editing and management, and designed to meet the needs of the semantic web is made available as an open-source solution, VocBench 3. A new version (4.0) of the platform has been recently released.​

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).

VocBench was originally released by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the Artificial Intelligence Research Group of the University of Rome Tor Vergata. VocBench 3 is funded by the ISA² Programme of the European Commission.

VocBench 3 v.4.0

The new and more user-friendly version VocBench 3 v.4.0 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, the new version 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.

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

What is next?

The further development of VocBench 3 is funded by the ISA² programme of the European Commission. At the operational level, the Publications Office of the European Union continues leading the development of VocBench 3 and a new release is expected to be made available to the public in September 2019.