SKOS — Simple Knowledge Organisation 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 types of controlled vocabulary. As an application of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) SKOS allows concepts to be documented, linked and merged with other data, while still being composed, integrated and published on the World Wide Web.

This document is an implementors guide for those who would like to represent their concept scheme using SKOS.

In basic SKOS, conceptual resources (concepts) can be identified using URIs, labelled with strings in one or more natural languages, documented with various types of notes, semantically related to each other in informal hierarchies and association networks, and aggregated into distinct concept schemes.

In advanced SKOS, conceptual resources can be mapped to conceptual resources in other schemes and grouped into labelled or ordered collections. Concept labels can also be related to each other. Finally, the SKOS vocabulary itself can be extended to suit the needs of particular communities of practice.

This document describes best practice recipes for publishing vocabularies or ontologies on the Web (in RDF Schema or OWL). The features of each recipe are described in detail, so that vocabulary designers may choose the recipe best suited to their needs. Each recipe introduces general principles and an example configuration for use with an Apache HTTP server (which may be adapted to other environments). The recipes are all designed to be consistent with the architecture of the Web as currently specified, although the associated example configurations have been kept intentionally simple.

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