Towards VocBench 3: Pushing collaborative development of thesauri and ontologies further beyond

More than three years have passed since the release of the second edition of VocBench, an open source collaborative web platform for the development of thesauri complying with Semantic Web standards. In these years, a vibrant user community has gathered around the system, consisting of public organizations, companies and independent users looking for open source solutions for maintaining their thesauri, code lists and authority resources. The focus on collaboration, the differentiation of user roles and the workflow management for content validation and publication have been the strengths of the platform, especially for those organizations requiring a centralized and controlled publication environment. Now the time has come to widen the scope of the platform: funded by the ISA2programme of the European Commission, VocBench 3 will offer a general-purpose collaborative environment for development of any kind of RDF dataset, improving the editing capabilities of its predecessor, while still maintaining the peculiar aspects that determined its success. In this paper, we review the requirements and the new objectives set for version 3, and then introduce the new characteristics that were implemented for this next iteration of the platform

VocBench 3: A collaborative Semantic Web editor for ontologies, thesauri and lexicons

VocBench is an open source web platform for the collaborative development of datasets complying with Semantic Web standards. Since its public release - five years ago - as an open source platform, VocBench has attracted a growing user community consisting of public organizations, companies and independent users looking for open source solutions for maintaining their thesauri, code lists and authority resources. The focus on collaboration, the differentiation of user roles and the workflow management for content validation and publication have been the strengths of the platform, especially for those organizations requiring a distributed, yet centrally controlled, publication environment. In 2017, a new, completely reengineered, version of the system has been released, broadening the scope of the platform: funded by the ISA2 programme of the European Commission, VocBench 3 offers a general-purpose collaborative environment for development of any kind of RDF dataset (with dedicated facilities for ontologies, thesauri and lexicons), improving the editing capabilities of its predecessor, while still maintaining the peculiar aspects that determined its success. In this article, we review the requirements and the new objectives set for version 3, and then introduce the new characteristics that were implemented for this new incarnation of the platfor