Subject areaData and infrastructure
Also known asSimple Knowledge Organization System
SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) is the standard for publishing a controlled vocabulary on the web: a thesaurus (a dictionary of related terms), a taxonomy (a tree-shaped classification) or a list of categories.
The W3C (the consortium that sets web standards) published it in 2009, and it rests on the linked data language of the semantic web.
Each concept gets its own address and a few clear properties. prefLabel is the preferred label, one per language; altLabel collects synonyms and acronyms; broader points to the more general concept and narrower to the more specific one. This is where the practical value comes from: a search engine or a language model understands that two different words name the same thing, and climbs the hierarchy without ambiguity.
The standard belongs to the W3C, so it is international; in the European Union the Publications Office uses it for EuroVoc (the multilingual thesaurus of the EU institutions), for ESCO (the European classification of skills and occupations) and for the EU Vocabularies collection.
An example
The case below is constructed, because the term does not yet appear in the articles. A chemical company publishes its product vocabulary: «solvent» is the broader concept, «acetone» the narrower one, and «dimethyl ketone» stays as an alternative label leading to the same concept.
Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com
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