Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)

SKOS (the Simple Knowledge Organization System) is a W3C Recommendation that provides a means for representing knowledge organization systems (including controlled vocabularies, thesauri, taxonomies, and folksonomies) in a distributed and linkable way. Knowledge Organization Systems have been around for a long time, most formally as part of Library Science, but means for representing and exchanging them in a computer network have not.

Given the existence of several thesaurus standards, one could well wonder why people found it necessary to create another one. The key differentiator between SKOS and existing thesaurus standards is its basis in the Semantic Web. Unlike existing standards, SKOS was designed ...

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