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VocBench 2.0: A Web Application for Collaborative Development of Multilingual Thesauri *DCMI/ASIST Joint Webinar*

==================================================================== *:: Time:* 10:00am EST (World Clock: 15:00 UTC http://bit.ly/DCMI-Webinar-Stellato) *:: Presenters:* Caterina Caracciolo & Armando Stellato *:: Date:* Wednesday, 4 March 2015 *:: Registration:* http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/DCMI_Handbook/webinars#2015caracciolo ====================================================================

*ABOUT THE WEBINAR:*

VocBench is a web-based platform for the collaborative maintenance of multilingual thesauri. VocBench is an open source project, developed in the context of a collaboration between the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN (FAO) and the University of Rome Tor Vergata. VocBench is currently used for the maintenance of AGROVOC, EUROVOC, GEMET, the thesaurus of the Italian Senate, the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus of Harvard University, as well as other thesauri.

VocBench has a strong focus on collaboration, supported by workflow management for content validation and publication. Dedicated user roles provide a clean separation of competencies, addressing different specificities ranging from management aspects to vertical competencies in 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. VocBench has been open source software since version 2 -- open to a large community of users and institutions supporting its development with their feedback and ideas.

During the webinar, Dr. Caracciolo and Dr. Stellato will demonstrate the main features of VocBench from the point of view of users and system administrators, and explain in what way you may join the project.

*ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:*

*Caterina Caracciolo*, PhD, has served as an Information Specialist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) since 2006. Currently, she is responsible for the AGROVOC Concept Scheme, and participates in the GACS Working Group and the Wheat Data Interoperability Working Group (RDA). Her main interest lay in the area of semantics for data integration and sharing, with a special focus on data specific to the domains of agriculture, biodiversity, natural science and environment in the broad sense. She regularly serves on program committees for international conferences and publishes in conference proceedings and journals in the area of semantic web and information sharing in agriculture and biodiversity. She has worked in various EC-funded projects and served as also served as Work Package leader in the NeOn and SemaGrow projects.

*Armando Stellato*, PhD, is Researcher at the University of Rome, Tor Vergata, where he carries on research and teaching in the fields of Knowledge Representation and Knowledge Based Systems. He is author of more than 70 publications on conferences and journals in the fields of Semantic Web, Natural Language Processing and related areas and has been member of the program committees of over 30 international scientific conferences and workshops. Currently his main interests cover Architecture Design for Knowledge Based Systems, Knowledge Acquisition and Onto-Linguistic interfaces, for which he participated to several EU funded projects, such as Crossmarc, Moses, Cuspis, Diligent, Neon, INSEARCH, SCIDIP-ES, AgInfra SemaGrow. Dr. Stellato is also consultant at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations as Semantic Architect, working on all aspects related to maintenance and publication of FAO RDF vocabularies such as AGROVOC, Biotech and Journal Authority Data and on the development of VocBench, an Application for Collaborative Management of RDF Vocabularies.

For more information and to register, visit http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/DCMI_Handbook/webinars#2015caracciolo