Johannes had the idea of VocBench in 2006 during his tenure with the "Food and Agriculture Organization " of the UN. He was responsible for the AGRIS system (International Information System for Agricultural Science and Technology. AGRIS thesaurus, "AGROVOC", needed a semantic transformation and this needed an editing tool. The FP6 EU project NEON gave the funding to embark on the adventure of developing the "AGROVOC concept server workbench. He is enthusiastic about what Vocbench has become today . After his tenure with FAO in 2017, Johannes worked for the GODAN (Global Open Data in Agriculture and Nutrition) secretariat and was specifically responsible for the GACS (Global Agricultural Concept Space) project. In January 2021 he joined Lore Star with the intention to make the VocBench a market leader in its area. Johannes has a PhD in Biology and before his tenure with FAO (1998-2017) he worked as an environmental toxicologist with the Italian Health Ministry. He has more than 100 publications from both areas - Pesticide Chemistry and Scientific Information Management. But he is in the same way proud of his level 3 award from the Wine and Spirit Education Trust (WSET). He lives in Orvieto, Italy.

2021 Talk: "VocBench", a semantic web collaborative development platform for ontologies, thesauri and lexicons

This presentation will feature and demonstrate "VocBench", an semantic web collaborative development platform for ontologies, thesauri and lexicons. VocBench has initially been developed for maintenance of the thesaurus "Agrovoc". It has become then a generic tool for thesaurus management and now features dedicated support for editing OWL ontologies, SKOS(/XL) thesauri, Ontolex-lemon lexicons, EDOAL linksets and generic RDF datasets. Advanced editing capabilities, high scalability (the platform integrates with high performant triple stores such as RDF4J and GraphDB) and editing and publication workflow management all contribute to a full-fledged collaborative online environment. The tool is opensource, but professional resources are available to offer services or develop necessary extensions.