SKOS

Taxonomy management with SKOS

Republishing an IBM developer works article.

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…

Converting JSON-LD schema.org RDF to other vocabularies

So that we can use tools designed around those vocabularies.

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.

Pulling SKOS prefLabel and altLabel values out of DBpedia

Or, using linked data to build a standards-compliant thesaurus with SPARQL.

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…

What SKOS-XL adds to SKOS

Extra flexibility for label metadata.

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.

Using the ontology editing tool SWOOP to edit taxonomies and thesaurii

Hopefully, as a more powerful open source alternative to existing taxonomy packages.

In the online course in taxonomy development that I took recently we reviewed several popular taxonomy development tools. I found them to be expensive or to have clunky, dated interfaces, and was disappointed that the formats most of these programs supported for storing saved work was either a binary proprietary format or what they just called “XML”. (I’m open to correction on any of these points.) “OK,” I wondered, “What XML?” Reviewing some samples of…