*********** Please excuse the cross postings ***********

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

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*:: 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
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*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