SKOS at the intersection of three disciplines

SKOS is at the intersection of three disciplines and their paradigms:

Whilst librarians, taxonomists, and specialists in the fields of text mining and entity extraction have started to embrace SKOS, especially ‘ontologists’ from artificial intelligence community still remain sceptical about the capabilities of SKOS.

With the latest release of PoolParty Thesaurus Server a full-blown ontology management facility has been introduced which can now be used to extend expressivity of SKOS knowledge models. For instance, SKOS concepts can become any other type of resource and by that schemas of additional relations and attributes can be applied to the concept.

PoolParty’s philosophy is to support users with Simple Knowledge Organization Systems (SKOS) first, to let them grow instantly by using various mechanisms like ontologies, text corpus analysis or linked data enrichment. All of them can nicely be combined. Users benefit from a step to step approach, not being bothered by an overarching approach from the very initial step. Learn more >>>

 

Do Controlled Vocabularies Matter?

The results of our survey about controlled vocabularies are published on Issuu.

The most interesting part of the results for me in a few words:

In August 2009 the W3C consortium announced the new SKOS standard – developed by the SWDWG – for bridging between the world of knowledge organization systems and the linked data community. Now, nearly two years after, it looks like this standard has well arrived. 48.7% stated that standards like SKOS are very important and 29.1% voted for “relevant”.

We also asked for other standards that are important for the participant’s daily work. From 250 nominations we decided to focus on those that had a score of at least 7. The big three are OWL, RDF and Dublin Core. Others were a variety of ISO terminologies, RSS, SPIN. Remarkable in this context is that SPARQL made it just to 5 mentions.

A couple of additional insights:
– most of our participants do have a clear awareness about controlled vocabularies and 85,4% are using them in their organization
– the bigger the organization the longer controlled vocabularies are used
– taxonomies and ontologies seem to be the preferred knowledge models
– semantic search, data integration and structure for content navigation are the main application areas for controlled vocabularies
– application areas like recommender systems, autocomplete suggestions and support for multilingual search are not seen as very relevant
– linked data is valued very positively as a future topic
– thesauri will support search engines in the near future to improve search results
– experience with controlled vocabularies is varying considerably among the branches
– there is a high awareness for standards like SKOS; the web-paradigm has entered the world of controlled vocabularies
– controlled vocabularies are no more locked in academic frames, they have also arrived in enterprise areas

Enjoy reading the full report!