Taxonomy and Thesaurus Development Using SKOS

Organise and curate data into rich taxonomies and thesauri with the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)

Every search engine, data catalogue and recommendation system rests on one thing: a structured way of organising knowledge. SKOS is how you build that.

We are all unwitting authors and users of taxonomies. They are a reflection of how the human mind makes sense of complexity — embedded in the technologies we build, the systems we navigate and the ways we describe the world around us. In the Information Age, that instinct for structure has become a professional discipline, and organisations across every sector are now exploiting taxonomy and thesaurus structures to architect data, capture meaning in computational form and power the systems that serve information to end users.

This course is a practical deep-dive into the Simple Knowledge Organization System — SKOS — a standard vocabulary developed and maintained by the W3C, and one of the most important tools available for building controlled vocabularies, taxonomies and thesauri. SKOS gives you a rich set of building blocks: concept trees organised as hierarchies, finer-grained concept breakdowns and lineage, concept schemes and collections, semantic relations for associating concepts, and mapping relations that allow you to curate, reconcile and mediate entities across multiple taxonomical models.

The result is the ability to take complex, messy domains of knowledge and organise them into structures that machines can reason over and humans can navigate — a skill that sits at the heart of semantic search, metadata management, enterprise vocabularies, data cataloguing, reference schemas and beyond.

What you will be able to do after this course:

• Design and develop taxonomy and thesaurus structures using SKOS

• Apply the full set of SKOS building blocks — concept schemes, collections, hierarchical and associative relations

• Use semantic mapping relations to reconcile and mediate concepts across multiple taxonomical models

• Build controlled vocabularies that underpin semantic search, metadata management and data cataloguing applications

• Understand how SKOS sits within the broader Semantic Web Stack and connects to ontology development

Who this course is for:

This course is aimed at information architects, data professionals, knowledge engineers, ontology practitioners and anyone working at the intersection of data organisation and meaning — particularly those with an interest in semantic technologies and their practical applications. If you want to bring rigour and structure to how knowledge is organised and represented in your systems, SKOS is an essential addition to your toolkit and this course is the right place to start.