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.

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…