Demystifying SKOS for Practitioners: A Practical Guide to Controlled Vocabularies
Semantics, standards, and structure: how SKOS, taxonomies, and controlled vocabularies power interoperability, governance, and meaning at scale in modern data ecosystems
There is a growing interest in “semantics” among data experts, such as in developing semantic data models and semantic layers. Information professionals, meanwhile, have always been involved with semantics (whether or not they called it that) in developing classification systems, indexes, taxonomies, tagging systems, and metadata schemas.
Semantics is about meaning, rather than just strings of text. The same text string can have different meanings in different contexts, and the same concept can be represented by different text strings for different users, use cases, and systems.
Thus, control, governance, policies, and standards are needed around semantics, especially when it comes to data and information sharing and interoperability across systems, repositories, and users.
Simple Knowledge Organization System or SKOS, a Semantic Web standard, has become the leading data model for consistency and interoperability for knowledge organization systems.
SKOS stands for Simple Knowledge Organization System. The concept of a “knowledge organization system” comes from the field of library and information science.
According to the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO)’s Knowledge Organization Encyclopedia, knowledge organization systems are functional items designed for organizing knowledge and information, and making their management and retrieval easier…they are basically made of terms/concepts.
Broadly defined, knowledge organization systems include term lists with definitions and/or other data (including dictionaries, glossaries, gazetteers, and terminologies) and structured arrangements of terms or concepts (including taxonomies, subject heading schemes, classification schemes, thesauri, and ontologies).
Although ontologies are considered knowledge organization systems, they are better known as knowledge representation systems. SKOS supports these various kinds of knowledge organization systems with the exception of ontologies, since there are other standards from the W3C for ontologies to support their greater complexity.
SKOS does not support all knowledge organization systems, and we usually refer to what is supported by SKOS as “vocabularies.”
Demystifying SKOS for Practitioners: A Practical Guide to Controlled Vocabularies
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Taxonomy Design Best Practice for Knowledge Graphs:
2024.connected-data.london/t…
Foundation for a Knowledge Graph: Taxonomy Design Best Practices
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