Chapter 10 - SKOS—managing vocabularies with RDFS-Plus

Abstract

SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) is a W3C Recommendation that provides a means for representing knowledge organization systems in a distributed and linkable way. SKOS was designed from the start to allow modelers to create modular knowledge organizations that can be reused and referenced across the Web. It was designed to augment thesaurus standard by bringing the distributed nature of the Semantic Web to thesauri and controlled vocabularies. Toward this end, it was also a design goal of SKOS that it be possible to map any thesaurus standards to SKOS in a fairly straightforward way. SKOS takes advantage of the distributed nature of RDF to allow extension to a network of information to be distributed across the Web. It relies on the inferencing structure of RDFS-Plus to add completeness to their information structure. SKOS vocabularies provide a cornerstone for linking information on the Web. Publishing vocabularies in SKOS allows the concepts they define to be referenced on a global scale.