A vocabulary management system must support many tasks, among them, the definition, annotation, discussion, translation and export of terms or concepts in standard formats. In particular, it should be capable of importing externally defined vocabularies to enable their re-use.

At the implementation level, a web-based platform is highly desirable to support remote collaboration. In meeting these requirements, the TDWG Vocabulary Management Task Group has proposed the use of MediaWiki^[1], the wiki engine that underpins Wikipedia, in conjunction with the Semantic MediaWiki (SMW)^[2] extension which allows data items to be tagged and queried within the wiki pages.

In this hands-on, practical session we will explore the use and advantages of Semantic MediaWiki for vocabulary management. Participants are encouraged to test how SMW can support a use case of their own, e.g., for translating an existing vocabulary or developing a new one. While the main features of SMW will be briefly introduced in the preceding session (Vocabulary Management I), we encourage prospective participants to begin their own exploration of the system beforehand at http://terms.gbif.org. In this session, we will begin with a short (5-10 min) live demonstration of the main features of the SMW interface and then act as tutors, answering questions, etc., as participants try out the system on their own laptops. As places are limited, prospective participants should indicate their interest in participating in the session by emailing Gregor Hagedorn (gregor.hagedorn at mfn-berlin.de) before Tuesday 29^th October.

^[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/

^[2] http://semantic-mediawiki.org/