VocBench is a web-based, multilingual, editing and workflow tool that manages thesauri,

authority lists, and glossaries using SKOS. VocBench is developed by FAO and its partners, and
it is designed to meet the needs of semantic web and linked data environments. VocBench
provides tools and functionalities that facilitate both collaborative editing and multilingual
terminology. It also includes administration and group management features that permit
flexible roles for maintenance, validation, and quality assurance.

SKOS—Simple Knowledge Organization System—provides a model for expressing the basic

structure and content of concept schemes such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject
heading lists, taxonomies, folksonomies, and other similar types of controlled vocabulary.

Controlled vocabularies provide a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval. They
are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri, taxonomies and other forms
of knowledge organization systems. Controlled vocabulary schemes mandate the use of
predefined, authorised terms that have been preselected by the designers of the schemes, in
contrast to natural language vocabularies, which have no such restriction.

A controlled vocabulary is an organized arrangement of words and phrases used to index

content and/or to retrieve content through browsing or searching. It typically includes
preferred and variant terms and has a defined scope or describes a specific domain.

The purpose of controlled vocabularies is to organize information and to provide terminology

to catalogue and retrieve information. While capturing the richness of variant terms,
controlled vocabularies also promote consistency in preferred terms and the assignment of
the same terms to similar content.