SKOS: Simple Knowledge Organisation for the Web

Abstract

SUMMARY This article introduces the Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS), a Semantic Web language for representing controlled structured vocabularies, including thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading systems, and taxonomies. SKOS provides a framework for publishing thesauri, classification schemes, and subject indexes on the Web, and for applying these systems to resource collections that are part of the Semantic Web. Semantic Web applications may harvest and merge SKOS data, to integrate and enhance retrieval service across multiple collections (e.g., libraries). This article also describes some alternatives for integrating Semantic Web services based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and SKOS into a distributed enterprise architecture.