Optimizing subject access to legal resources: EuroVoc and VocBench. Benefits of using multilingual controlled vocabularies and an open source collaborative tool for their maintenance

The Publications Office of the European Union is an interinstitutional office entrusted with the task of publishing EU law and publications in the 24 official EU languages. To face the challenge of publishing multilingual legal data, the Publications Office makes use of multilingual controlled vocabularies such as authority tables and the EuroVoc thesaurus. EuroVoc is a multilingual multidisciplinary thesaurus covering the activity fields of the EU institutions. It is expressed using the semantic web standards recommended by the W3C organization. Besides modelling flexibility and reasoning capabilities, these technologies also facilitate the alignment of EuroVoc with other thesauri and controlled vocabularies, such as national and domain-specific vocabularies. Authoring, maintenance and management of the EuroVoc thesaurus is performed using VocBench, an open source collaborative web platform for the development of thesauri, complying with the SKOS and SKOS-XL standards. Thanks to funding by the ISA2 programme of the European Commission a new major version of VocBench has been developed that will be available in Q3/2017.