Extended Labelling Properties

The SKOS Core vocabulary includes two properties for assigning labels to concepts: skos:prefLabel and skos:altLabel.

You may, however, want a richer set of labelling propeties.

For example, you might want to express the fact that one term is the scientific name for a concept, and another term is the common name for the same concept. To do this, you would declare two new properties, for example:

<rdf:RDF 
  xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" 
  xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#">
  
  <rdf:Property rdf:about="http://my.example.org/knowledgebase/schema#scientificName">
    <rdfs:comment>A scientific name for the concept.</rdfs:comment>
    <rdfs:subPropertyOf rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#prefLabel"/>
  </rdf:Property>

  <rdf:Property rdf:about="http://my.example.org/knowledgebase/schema#commonName">
    <rdfs:comment>A common (non-scientific) name for the concept.</rdfs:comment>
    <rdfs:subPropertyOf rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#altLabel"/>
  </rdf:Property>

</rdf:RDF>

These new properties could then be used as in:

<rdf:RDF 
  xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" 
  xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
  xmlns:skos="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#"
  xmlns:my="http://my.example.org/knowledgebase/schema#">

  <skos:Concept rdf:about="http://my.example.org/knowledgebase/biology#spottedbowerbird">
    <my:scientificName>Chlamydera maculata</my:scientificName>
    <my:commonName>Spotted bowerbird</my:commonName>
  </skos:Concept>

</rdf:RDF>

Which of the two SKOS Core labelling properties you extend is a matter of choice, but bear in mind that a concept may have at most only one value of the property skos:prefLabel per language.