Mission statement for SKOS

Hi all,

I wrote a sort of mission statement for SKOS, just to be very clear about
what I think the goals of the schemas out to be.

Mission Statement for SKOS:

*	The SKOS schemas are an entry point to the Semantic Web for
Knowledge Organisation Systems (KOS) such as thesauri.  

*	The design of the SKOS schemas should be such that existing data in
the form of e.g. thesauri can be mapped directly into the SKOS constructs,
or some extension of the SKOS constructs, without any loss of information.  

*	Furthermore, it should be possible to define a completely automated
transformation from existing data structures into an SKOS representation,
and no extra manual effort on the part of a human agent should be required
to achieve the transformation.

*	Finally, it should be possible to create an RDFS/OWL ontology from
an SKOS concept scheme, merely by the addition of further statements.  No
transformation of the underlying structure of the data should be required.

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The short version of the above is: 

"You can use SKOS to get a thesaurus onto the semantic web without too much
effort.  Then, adding more to the SKOS scheme to make it more like an
ontology should be easy too."

Al.         


---
Alistair Miles
Research Associate
CCLRC - Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Building R1 Room 1.60
Fermi Avenue
Chilton
Didcot
Oxfordshire OX11 0QX
United Kingdom
Email:        a.j.miles@rl.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1235 445440

Received on Wednesday, 24 March 2004 21:21:28 UTC