SKOSinspired

SKOSinspired refers to a family of knowledge organization approaches that take inspiration from SKOS, the Simple Knowledge Organization System, to model vocabularies and concept schemes for the web. It describes designs that reuse SKOS-like ideas—concepts, schemes, labels, and relationships—while avoiding some of SKOS’s full formal constraints.

Core concepts often include concepts identified by IRIs, preferred and alternative labels, and relationships such as broader, narrower, and related. Some SKOSinspired models also support mappings to external vocabularies, collections to group terms, and notes attached to concepts. They typically implement a subset or a modest extension of SKOS semantics.

Data modeling and serialization: SKOSinspired designs are usually RDF-based, aiming for interoperability with existing vocabularies. They may reuse SKOS predicates or define lightweight custom predicates, and are commonly serialized in Turtle, JSON-LD, or RDF/XML. The emphasis is on clarity, publishability, and web-scale linking.

Usage and applications: SKOSinspired vocabularies find use in digital libraries, catalogs, educational repositories, and search interfaces to improve navigation and discovery. They support multilingual labeling, faceted search, and concept-based querying, enabling cross-domain interoperability when aligned with shared reference vocabularies.

Relation to SKOS and standards: SKOSinspired is not a formal standard. It is a practical design approach derived from SKOS principles, offering flexibility for organizations to publish knowledge organization data without adopting the entire SKOS specification. See also SKOS, thesauri, taxonomy.