The applicability of SKOS to knowledge organization systems

Abstract

The Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), released as a W3C recommendation, is a common data model and language for sharing and linking knowledge organization systems via the Web. However, studies on its application to classification schemes are limited compared to those on its application to terminologies, such as a thesaurus, and the utility of SKOS for the classification schemes is not validated. In this paper, we focused on the lexical labels of SKOS and investigated an appropriate method of expressing the classification schemes using the Dewey Decimal Classification as an example. The results showed that there is no difference between the terminologies and classification schemes in the expression of SKOS concept and lexical labels. We showed that SKOS is available for the expression of the basic elements of the classification schemes and has the potential to be applied to any existing knowledge organization systems.