Born in the early 1980's as a multilingual agricultural thesaurus, AGROVOC has steadily evolved over the last fifteen years, moving to an electronic version around the year 2000, and embracing the Semantic Web shortly thereafter. Today AGROVOC is a SKOS-XL concept scheme published as Linked Open Data, containing links (as well as backlinks) and references to many other Linked Datasets in the LOD cloud. In this paper we provide a brief historical summary of AGROVOC and detail its specification as a Linked Dataset.

With the continued growth of online semantic information, the processes of searching and managing this massive scale and heterogeneous content have become increasingly challenging. In this work, we present PowerAqua, an ontologybased Question Answering system that is able to answer queries by locating and integrating information, which can be distributed across heterogeneous semantic resources. We provide a complete overview of the system including: the research challenges that it addresses, its architecture, the evaluations that have been conducted to test it, and an in-depth discussion showing how PowerAqua effectively supports users in querying and exploring Semantic Web content.

Abstract:The AGROVOC multilingual thesaurus maintained by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations is now published as linked data. In order to reach this goal AGROVOC was expressed in Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) and its concepts provided with dereferenceable URIs. AGROVOC is now aligned with ten other multilingual Knowledge Organisation Systems (KOS) related to agriculture, using the SKOS properties exact match and close match. Alignments were automatically produced in Eclipse using a customdesigned tool and then validated by a domain expert. The resulting data is publicly available to both humans and machines using a SPARQL endpoint together with a modifi ed version of Pubby, a lightweight front-end tool for publishing linked data. This paper describes the process that led to the current linked data AGROVOC and discusses current and future applications and directions. This paper extends a shorter version presented at MTSR 2011.

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 aspects 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 architecture, and evaluate it under both a functional and user-appreciation ground, through a comparison with state-of-the-art and user questionnaires analysis, respectively. Finally, we provide insights on future developments.

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