Hi Yitzchak, Probably the quickest explanation is to look at the first few slides from a presentation that I gave on SKOS at the Open Forum on Metadata Registries last year... http://www.slideshare.net/jonphipps/skos-2007-open-forum-on-metadata- registries-nyc/
Currently, SKOS is headed towards being a W3C recommendation. There's a new RFC draft of the SKOS Primer... http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-skos-primer-20080221/ From the new primer: "SKOS — Simple Knowledge Organisation System — provides a model for expressing the basic structure and content of concept schemes such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies, folksonomies, and other types of controlled vocabulary. As an application of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) SKOS allows concepts to be documented, linked and merged with other data, while still being composed, integrated and published on the World Wide Web." But comparing SKOS to other projects in Libraryland is liable to be anything but quick, imho. There are other standard methods for describing thesauri and vocabularies (Z39.19, ISO2788/5964, BS8723 -- and see http://www.w3c.rl.ac.uk/SWAD/thes_links.htm), but none that I'm aware of that are as rdf-centric as SKOS. Hope this gives you a better place to start, Jon Phipps Cornell University Library On Mar 4, 2008, at 9:55 AM, Yitzchak Schaffer wrote:
Greetings all: Many thanks to all the presenters for a great conference! One thing that people kept mentioning was SKOS. That was a duhh point for me; I just took a look at the w3.org and Wikipedia pages on it, but it doesn't look like something I can spend time trying to figure out right now. Does anyone have a quick explanation comparing this to other projects/concepts in Libraryland? Many thanks, -- Yitzchak Schaffer Systems Librarian Touro College Libraries 33 West 23rd Street New York, NY 10010 Tel (212) 463-0400 x230 Fax (212) 627-3197 [EMAIL PROTECTED]