Organise & curate data into rich taxonomy and thesaurus structures with the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)
Articulate the purpose and applications of taxonomies and thesauri, and recognise different types of taxonomies
Understand the building blocks provided in the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)
Utilise SKOS Core to develop taxonomies and thesauri, as well as to support the semantic curation of concepts and terms
Run SPARQL queries to interrogate SKOS-structured taxonomies and thesauri
Recognise important system architecture considerations when scaling SKOS-based knowledge graphs
[Skills – Must Have] Foundational understanding of RDF and SPARQL
[Skills – Must Have] Basic ontology development skills using the Web Ontology Language (OWL)
[Tooling] Protégé ontology editor
g. Notepad++, Visual Studio Code, TextEdit (Mac), Notepad (Windows)
We are all unwitting authors and users of them. They are a reflection of how the human mind makes sense of complexity and structure. They are embedded in so many technologies we develop to solve problems and serve information to end users.
Taxonomies and thesauri have been around for a long and, nowadays, in the Information Age we are exploiting taxonomy and thesaurus structures to architect and organise data and capture semantics in computational form.
This course provides a practical deep-dive on how to apply the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) – a standard Semantic Web vocabulary developed and maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – to construct controlled vocabularies, taxonomies and thesauri.
SKOS comes with a rich set of building blocks to develop concept trees as hierarchies, as well as their breakdown and lineage into finer-grained concepts. SKOS also comes with several other Knowledge Organisation System (KOS) structures to define concept schemes, collections, semantic relations for concept associations and semantic mapping relations that allow the curation, reconciliation and mediation of entities across multiple taxonomical models.
SKOS is a key asset to be learnt by anyone who has an interest in information architecture that underpins applications intended for semantic search, metadata management, enterprise vocabularies, data cataloguing, reference schemas, and many more.
Individuals who work in data management, e.g. metadata managers, data governors, data consultants, etc.
Information & metadata architects, and software developers who need to learn how to build taxonomies & thesauri based on Semantic Web standards
Early-career library science and information / knowledge management professionals
Content and document management professionals with an interest in taxonomy standards & modelling approaches
