Knowledge organization system (KOS), concept system or concept scheme is the generic term used in knowledge organization for the selection of concepts with an indication of selected semantic relations. [1] Despite their differences in type, coverage and application, all KOS aim to support the organization of knowledge and information to facilitate their management and retrieval.
KOS can be represented in can be expressed in RDF and RDFS as per the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) recommendation by W3C, which aims to enable the sharing and linking of KOS via the Web. [2]
Many lists of KOS exist with BARTOC being the largest and most general one.
Examples of knowledge organization systems include:
The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable.
A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), formerly Universal Resource Identifier, is a unique sequence of characters that identifies an abstract or physical resource, such as resources on a webpage, mail address, phone number, books, real-world objects such as people and places, concepts. URIs are used to identify anything described using the Resource Description Framework (RDF), for example, concepts that are part of an ontology defined using the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and people who are described using the Friend of a Friend vocabulary would each have an individual URI.
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a method to describe and exchange graph data. It was originally designed as a data model for metadata by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It provides a variety of syntax notations and data serialization formats, of which the most widely used is Turtle.
The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe taxonomies and classification networks, essentially defining the structure of knowledge for various domains: the nouns representing classes of objects and the verbs representing relations between the objects.
XML Linking Language, or XLink, is an XML markup language and W3C specification that provides methods for creating internal and external links within XML documents, and associating metadata with those links.
In computer hypertext, a URI fragment is a string of characters that refers to a resource that is subordinate to another, primary resource. The primary resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), and the fragment identifier points to the subordinate resource.
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RDFa or Resource Description Framework in Attributes is a W3C Recommendation that adds a set of attribute-level extensions to HTML, XHTML and various XML-based document types for embedding rich metadata within Web documents. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) data-model mapping enables its use for embedding RDF subject-predicate-object expressions within XHTML documents. It also enables the extraction of RDF model triples by compliant user agents.
The ultimate goal of semantic technology is to help machines understand data. To enable the encoding of semantics with the data, well-known technologies are RDF and OWL. These technologies formally represent the meaning involved in information. For example, ontology can describe concepts, relationships between things, and categories of things. These embedded semantics with the data offer significant advantages such as reasoning over data and dealing with heterogeneous data sources.
Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a W3C recommendation designed for representation of thesauri, classification schemes, taxonomies, subject-heading systems, or any other type of structured controlled vocabulary. SKOS is part of the Semantic Web family of standards built upon RDF and RDFS, and its main objective is to enable easy publication and use of such vocabularies as linked data.
Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) is a web site managed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for accessing and discussing agricultural information management standards, tools and methodologies connecting information workers worldwide to build a global community of practice. Information management standards, tools and good practices can be found on AIMS:
Subject indexing is the act of describing or classifying a document by index terms, keywords, or other symbols in order to indicate what different documents are about, to summarize their contents or to increase findability. In other words, it is about identifying and describing the subject of documents. Indexes are constructed, separately, on three distinct levels: terms in a document such as a book; objects in a collection such as a library; and documents within a field of knowledge.
The International Society for Knowledge Organization, or ISKO, is a professional association for scholars of knowledge organization, knowledge structures, classification studies, and information organization and structure.
Metadata Authority Description Schema (MADS) is an XML schema developed by the United States Library of Congress' Network Development and Standards Office that provides an authority element set to complement the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS).
ISO 25964 is the international standard for thesauri, published in two parts as follows:
ISO 25964 Information and documentation - Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabulariesPart 1: Thesauri for information retrieval [published August 2011] Part 2: Interoperability with other vocabularies [published March 2013]
In library and information science documents are classified and searched by subject – as well as by other attributes such as author, genre and document type. This makes "subject" a fundamental term in this field. Library and information specialists assign subject labels to documents to make them findable. There are many ways to do this and in general there is not always consensus about which subject should be assigned to a given document. To optimize subject indexing and searching, we need to have a deeper understanding of what a subject is. The question: "what is to be understood by the statement 'document A belongs to subject category X'?" has been debated in the field for more than 100 years
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Birger Hjørland is a professor of knowledge organization at the Royal School of Library and Information Science (RSLIS) in Copenhagen. His main areas of study pertain to theory of library and information science and of knowledge organization. Hjørland has contributed important developments to domain analysis and concept theory. He has been cited as an anchor of North American knowledge organization studies, as well as an information science pioneer.
The PoolParty Semantic Suite is a technology platform provided by the Semantic Web Company. The EU-based company belongs to the early pioneers of the Semantic Web movement. The product uses standards-based technologies, namely the Resource Description Framework (RDF), as defined by W3C, which prevents vendor lock-in.
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