Semantic Web Deployment Working Group - Publications
Recommendations
- Deliverers
- Semantic Web Deployment Working Group
This document defines the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), a common data model for sharing and linking knowledge organization systems via the Web.
Many knowledge organization systems, such as thesauri, taxonomies, classification schemes and subject heading systems, share a similar structure, and are used in similar applications. SKOS captures much of this similarity and makes it explicit, to enable data and technology sharing across diverse applications.
The SKOS data model provides a standard, low-cost migration path for porting existing knowledge organization systems to the Semantic Web. SKOS also provides a light weight, intuitive language for developing and sharing new knowledge organization systems. It may be used on its own, or in combination with formal knowledge representation languages such as the Web Ontology language (OWL).
This document is the normative specification of the Simple Knowledge Organization System. It is intended for readers who are involved in the design and implementation of information systems, and who already have a good understanding of Semantic Web technology, especially RDF and OWL.
For an informative guide to using SKOS, see the SKOS Primer.
Notes
- Deliverers
- Semantic Web Deployment Working Group
SKOS—Simple Knowledge Organization 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 similar types of controlled vocabulary. As an application of the Resource Description Framework (RDF), SKOS allows concepts to be composed and published on the World Wide Web, linked with data on the Web and integrated into other concept schemes.
This document is a user guide for those who would like to represent their concept scheme using SKOS.
In basic SKOS, conceptual resources (concepts) are identified with URIs, labelled with strings in one or more natural languages, documented with various types of note, semantically related to each other in informal hierarchies and association networks, and aggregated into concept schemes.
In advanced SKOS, conceptual resources can be mapped across concept schemes and grouped into labelled or ordered collections. Relationships between concept labels can be specified. Finally, the SKOS vocabulary itself can be extended to suit the needs of particular communities of practice or combined with other modelling vocabularies.
This document is a companion to the SKOS Reference, which gives the normative reference on SKOS.
- Deliverers
- Semantic Web Deployment Working Group
Knowledge organisation systems, such as taxonomies, thesauri or subject heading lists, play a fundamental role in information structuring and access. The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group aims at providing a model for representing such vocabularies on the Semantic Web: SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation System).
This document presents the preparatory work for a future version of SKOS. It lists representative use cases, which were obtained after a dedicated questionnaire was sent to a wide audience. It also features a set of fundamental or secondary requirements derived from these use cases, that will be used to guide the design of SKOS.
The Resource Description Framework RDF allows users to describe both Web documents and concepts from the real world—people, organisations, topics, things—in a computer-processable way. Publishing such descriptions on the Web creates the Semantic Web. URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) are very important, providing both the core of the framework itself and the link between RDF and the Web. This document presents guidelines for their effective use. It discusses two strategies, called 303 URIs and hash URIs. It gives pointers to several Web sites that use these solutions, and briefly discusses why several other proposals have problems.
- Deliverers
- Semantic Web Deployment Working Group
- Translation for Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies
- français
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.