adfa, p. 1, 2011. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 VocBench: a Web Application for Collaborative Development of Multilingual Thesauri Armando Stellato 1 , Sachit Rajbhandari 2 , Andrea Turbati 1 , Manuel Fiorelli 1 , Caterina Caracciolo 2 , Tiziano Lorenzetti 1 , Johannes Keizer 2 , Maria Teresa Pazienza 1 1 ART Group, Dept. of Enterprise Engineering University of Rome, Tor Vergata Via del Politecnico 1, 00133 Rome, Italy {stellato,turbati,fiorelli,pazienza,lorenzetti}@info.uniroma2.it 2 The Food and Agricultural Organization of UN (FAO) Viale delle Terme di Caracalla, 00153 Rome, Italy {sachit.rajbhandari,caterina.caracciolo,johannes.keizer}@fao.org Abstract. We introduce VocBench, an open source web application for editing thesauri complying with the SKOS and SKOS-XL standards. VocBench has a strong focus on collaboration, supported by workflow management for content validation and publication. Dedicated user roles provide a clean separation of competences, addressing different specificities ranging from management as- pects to vertical competences on content editing, such as conceptualization versus terminology editing. Extensive support for scheme management allows editors to fully exploit the possibilities of the SKOS model, as well as to fulfill its integrity constraints. We discuss thoroughly the main features of VocBench, detail its ar- chitecture, and evaluate it under both a functional and user-appreciation ground, through a comparison with state-of-the-art and user questionnaires analysis, re- spectively. Finally, we provide insights on future developments. Keywords: Collaborative Thesaurus Management, SKOS, SKOS-XL 1 Introduction SKOS [1] provided public institutions and other organizations with a fast path toward the Semantic Web [2], by allowing them to represent in RDF thesauri and other knowledge organization systems (KOSs) [3] traditionally adopted for tasks such as re- source indexing, query expansion and faceted search. SKOS proves advantageous [4] for representing concept-based KOSs on the Semantic Web and the Linked Data [5], as it fosters interoperability of resources and the development of distributed applications. Additionally, SKOS-XL [6] provides an extension for describing terms, through lexical relationships and various metadata, concerning aspects such as history notes, editorial workflows and publication status. The SKOS specification is intentionally loose in de- fining the semantics of the provided modeling, in order to accommodate the variety of existing practices and guidelines for the compilation of KOSs. Furthermore, many of