Save the date! VocBench Community meeting on 6-7 June at the Publications Office of the EU, Luxembourg
Armando Stellato
Dear VocBenchers (and…how to say…ShowVoccers? )
Long time has passed from a first stakeholder meeting that was held, on February 2016, at the Publications Office of the EU, at the dawn of the VocBench 3 project.
At the time, the objective of that meeting was to gather feedback and ideas from a group of stakeholders that had already experience with VocBench 2 (which had been developed through a joint effort of FAO – partially funded by the NEON European Research Project – and University of Rome Tor Vergata) towards the realization of a new incarnation of the platform.
Funded by an action of the ISA2 programme, VocBench 3 has been quickly gaining the attention of many users, especially from large organizations, thanks to its collaborative framework, organized publication workflow, extensible architecture, its many editing features and its unique wide coverage of diverse core models of the RDF family (RDFS, OWL ontologies SKOS, SKOS-XL thesauri and OntoLex lexicons and onto-lexicon interfaces).
Today, we can abandon the cold notion of “stakeholders” and really talk about a community, because this is what this group has become: hundreds of users not just asking questions and presenting issues to the developers, rather actively participating and helping each other by sharing their experiences and findings.
Since 2022, VocBench has received new funding from the DIGITAL Programme of the EU [1] and it’s time to renew its contact with the users: it is thus with great joy that I’m communicating that, on the 6th and 7th of June, the first VocBench Community Meeting will take place at the Publications Office of the EU, in Luxembourg.
All of those interested in participating are welcome to the event1 . It will be a great occasion to provide your feedback on VocBench and ShowVoc and, even more important, to provide your ideas and indications for the future. This won’t be a generic “hear your users” but a real community-driven plan for the next years to come. Last but definitely not the least, a great occasion to meet in person and give faces to the many emails we exchanged on this group!
I would kindly ask all interested users to write directly to me (not on the group, to avoid excessive unwanted traffic) manifesting their interest to come, by using the following simple template:
Email subject: [vocbench community meeting] <organization> <full name>
Email body: whatever you would like to add is appreciated (and will be read ;-) ). In any case, following your manifestation of interest, an invitation will follow by the Publications Office, probably including a questionnaire where you can put more detailed information.
Looking forward to meeting as many of you as possible in June in Luxembourg!!
Armando, on behalf of the VocBench/ShowVoc team and the Publications Office of the EU
1it will be an open event, yet registration will be necessary for organization purposes.
[1] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/activities/digital-programme