At: http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-skos-primer-20080221/
>From Robin Cover:
W3C Publishes SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Primer Antoine Isaac and Ed Summers (eds), W3C Technical Report
Members of the W3C Semantic Web Deployment Working Group have published the First Public Working Draft for the "SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Primer." SKOS provides a model for expressing the basic structure and content of concept schemes such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies, folksonomies, and other types of controlled vocabulary. SKOS has been designed to provide a low-cost migration path for porting existing organization systems to the Semantic Web. SKOS also provides a light weight, intuitive conceptual modeling language for developing and sharing new KOSs. It can be used on its own, or in combination with more formal languages like the Web Ontology Language (OWL). SKOS can also be seen as a bridging technology, providing the missing link between the rigorous logical formalism of ontology languages such as OWL and the chaotic, informal and weakly-structured world of social approaches to information management, as exemplified by social tagging applications. In the library and information sciences, a long and distinguished heritage is devoted to developing tools for organizing large collections of objects such as books or museum artifacts. These tools are known generally as "knowledge organization systems" (KOS) or sometimes "controlled structured vocabularies", although no widely agreed definitions exist for these terms. The situation is complicated because several similar yet distinct traditions have emerged over time, each supported by a distinct community of practice and set of agreed standards. Different families of knowledge organization systems, including "thesauri", "classification schemes", "subject heading systems", and "taxonomies" are widely recognized and applied in both modern and traditional information systems. In practice it can be hard to draw an absolute distinction between "thesauri" and "classification schemes" or "taxonomies." SKOS aims to provide a bridge between different communities of practice within the library and information sciences involved in the design and application of knowledge organization systems. In addition, SKOS aims to provide a bridge between these communities and the Semantic Web, by transferring existing models of knowledge organization to the Semantic Web technology context, and by providing a low-cost migration path for porting existing knowledge organization systems to RDF.
-- Tony Linde Mobile: +44 (0)785 298 8840 Skype <callto:tonylinde> , Email <mailto:Tony.Linde-at-leicester.ac.uk> , Web <http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~ael> , Calendar <http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=tonylinde%40gmail.com> , LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/in/tonylinde>Received on 2008-02-22Z18:02:38