This page is a proposal for a section of the ["SKOS/Semantics"] wiki draft. Revised on DateTime().
Module: Concept Schemes
This module defines the formal vocabulary and semantics for the notion of a SKOS Concept Scheme (hereafter concept scheme).
The notion of a concept scheme is defined informally in the SKOS Primer.
The SKOS Primer also defines best practices for using rdfs:isDefinedBy to explicitly state the relationship between a SKOS conceptual resource and the concept scheme in which it is defined.
Vocabulary |
skos:ConceptScheme |
Axiomatic Triples |
skos:ConceptScheme rdf:type owl:Class. |
skos:ConceptScheme denotes the class of SKOS concept schemes. Beyond this statement, there are no further semantics conditions on the interpretation of skos:ConceptScheme.
skos:ConceptScheme MAY be interpreted as a sub-class of the class of named RDF graphs. This would be consistent with using the name (URI) of a concept scheme in SPARQL queries as the name of a graph, to establish, for example, the provenance of a semantic relationship between two SKOS conceptual resources. For more information on design patterns for using SPARQL to query SKOS data, see [@@TODO what?].
This interpretation would not be appropriate, however, if different named RDF graphs were used to express different "states" or "versions" of a concept scheme; or if a concept scheme were interpreted as having alternative expressions, as an RDF graph and an HTML document for example (in which case separate URIs might be required for the concept scheme, the RDF graph, and the HTML document).
skos:ConceptScheme MAY also be interpreted as a sub-class of owl:Ontology. This would be consistent with using owl:imports to make logical import statements between SKOS concept schemes.