SKOScompatible

SKOScompatible is a term used to describe data, vocabularies, or software that adheres to the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) specification published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Systems described as SKOScompatible aim to enable interoperability among knowledge organization systems by employing the SKOS core vocabulary for concepts, concept schemes, labels, notations, notes, and mappings.

In practice, SKOScompatible resources model concepts with skos:Concept, group them into skos:ConceptScheme, and optionally organize them in skos:Collection. They use skos:prefLabel, skos:altLabel, and skos:hiddenLabel for multilingual labeling, as well as skos:definition and skos:scopeNote for documentation. Relationships such as skos:broader, skos:narrower, and skos:related express hierarchical or associative links, while skos:notation provides machine-readable identifiers. For aligning with other vocabularies, mapping properties such as skos:exactMatch, skos:closeMatch, and skos:relatedMatch are used.

Conformance and usage: There is no formal SKOS certification. SKOScompatible is typically a self-declared claim, evaluated by whether the data or software uses the SKOS vocabulary and constructs correctly in RDF. Common serialization formats include RDF/XML, Turtle, and JSON-LD. Some SKOScompatible projects also incorporate extensions such as SKOS-XL for advanced labeling. Effective SKOScompatibility also implies using dereferenceable URIs and providing documentation about the vocabulary and its applications.