In 2011, IBM developerWorks published an article that I wrote titled “Improve your taxonomy management using the W3C SKOS standard.” (They have always loved those “Get Better at This Thing” titles.) Several years later they took it (and a ton of other developerWorks content) down. I have republished it here as background for recent discussions about when OWL is appropriate to use and when it isn’t; more on that next month. I didn’t change anything but added a…

Last month I wrote about how we can treat the growing amount of JSON-LD in the world as RDF. By “treat” I mean “query it with SPARQL and use it with the wide choice of RDF application development tools out there”. While I did demonstrate that JSON-LD does just fine with URIs from outside of the schema.org vocabulary, the vast majority of JSON-LD out there uses schema.org.

When my TopQuadrant colleague Dean Allemang referred to the use of DBpedia as a controlled vocabulary, I said “Huh?” He helped me to realize that if you and I want to refer to the same person, place, or thing, but there’s a chance that we might use different names for it, DBpedia’s URI for it might make the best identifier for us to both use. For example, if you refer to the nineteenth-century American president and Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant and I refer to him as…

In my first few glances at SKOS eXtension for Labels, I didn’t quite get it. Recently, though, while looking at a client’s requirements document at TopQuadrant, when I saw that they wanted to attach metadata to individual terms, I started modeling this in my head and then I realized I didn’t need to: SKOS-XL already had.

Last April Richard Cyganiak tweeted the following:

Last week I discussed the possibility of using the SWOOP ontology editor and the W3C’s SKOS standard to create taxonomies or thesaurii, and I promised to go into a little more detail about how to do so.