Build On Synergies And Share Standards And Technologies To Boost Your Knowledge Organization Systems And Language Resources

The European Union is characterised by the use of 24 official languages. Their harmonious co-existence provides fuel to democracy, transparency and accountability. While it is clear that multilingual language resources support oral and written communication for the benefit of some 447 million citizens, multilingualism is an example of good practice in the creation and maintenance of knowledge organisation systems and reference data lists. To this end, a closer collaboration of the corresponding professional communities is to be supported and facilitated. As such, we need to make sure that professionals in the linguistic fields and their counterparts in the semantic web and information and knowledge management fields work hand-in-hand whenever necessary.

The Publications Office of the European Union contributes to the effort through, among others, the provision of an access to two open source semantic applications developed in the framework of the ISA² programme and, from now on, the Digital Europe Programme: VocBench and ShowVoc. They both ease the multilingual and collaborative creation, maintenance, sharing and visualisation of language resources and knowledge organisation systems. Consequently, both professional communities can build on the same tools and technologies, while benefiting from specialised knowledge enhancing the quality, multilingualism and impact of their work in today’s societies, organisations and companies.