VocBench

VocBench is an open-source web-based workbench for collaborative development and maintenance of controlled vocabularies and ontologies. It is particularly oriented to SKOS-based thesauri and multilingual vocabularies, enabling teams to co-edit concepts, schemes, and relationships in a shared environment.

Its core functionality includes editing of concept schemes and concepts, assignment of preferred labels and synonyms in multiple languages, hierarchical relations (broader/narrower), mapping between concepts, notes and documentation, and support for provenance and versioning. It provides role-based access control, workflows for review and publication, and change tracking to support governance.

VocBench supports importing and exporting data in common standards used for vocabularies, such as SKOS RDF, Turtle, RDF/XML, and other formats, and offers search and browse interfaces, validation, and visualization of concept hierarchies. It is designed to interoperate with RDF stores and SPARQL endpoints and can be integrated into larger vocabulary portfolios and knowledge graphs.

Adoption and usage: It has been adopted by several international and national vocabulary projects, including FAO's AgroVoc, and is used by research and public-sector organizations to manage multilingual terminology collections and align vocabularies across domains.

Development and availability: VocBench is maintained as an open-source project with ongoing development and community contributions. The software and documentation are available through its project repositories, with installation guides and user manuals for administrators and editors.