SKOSRDF

SKOSRDF refers to the RDF representation of the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), a W3C Recommendation for modeling knowledge organization systems such as thesauri, taxonomies, classification schemes, and glossaries. SKOS is designed to be lightweight and compatible with the Semantic Web, built on the RDF data model and RDF Schema, and aimed at interoperability and ease of use.

In SKOSRDF, concepts are resources of type skos:Concept. Concept schemes are skos:ConceptScheme, and collections are skos:Collection. Concepts can be related through hierarchical relations using skos:broader and skos:narrower (including their transitive forms) and through associative relations with skos:related. Each concept can have lexical labels such as skos:prefLabel, skos:altLabel, as well as other descriptive properties like skos:definition, skos:scopeNote, and skos:example. A concept is placed in one or more concept schemes with skos:inScheme and can be a member of one or more collections via skos:member.

SKOSRDF also specifies mapping properties for aligning concepts with external vocabularies, including skos:exactMatch, skos:closeMatch, skos:broadMatch, skos:narrowMatch, and skos:relatedMatch. These mappings support interoperability and merging of heterogeneous knowledge sources.

Reusing SKOSRDF involves serialization in RDF formats such as RDF/XML, Turtle, N-Triples, or JSON-LD. SKOS-XL is an extension that provides more advanced lexical representations by allowing labels to be resources with literal forms. SKOSRDF emphasizes multilingual data through language-tagged literals and broad applicability across domains.

Usage of SKOSRDF is widespread for publishing and interlinking controlled vocabularies on the Web. It underpins library catalogs, museums, government portals, and academic repositories by offering a standard, machine-readable model for organizing concepts and their relationships.