SKOS brings non-Web systems onto the Web, attempting to bring their own semantics along.
There are many knowledge organisation schemes already in existence, such as catalogues, thesauri and general lists of things. In moving to the Web, these can either be ignored, masaged into a suitably compliant form such as the Semantic Web, or given some sort of representation on the Web consistent with its own semantics. SKOS takes the third approach.
SKOS can be described as the 'Soft' Semantic Web. It doesn't have the semantic power of formalisms such as OWL. Instead, it can be used to bring an existing KOS onto the Web. SKOS itself has only a weak semantic model so it be used for simple deductions, but at least that is better than nothing, and for many KOS it is a far simpler task than re-writing the KOS to fit into OWL.
Copyright © Jan Newmarch, jan@newmarch.name
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