Jakoblog — Das Weblog von Jakob Voß

Encoding ISO 3166 in RDF with SKOS

Last year at the 2nd International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR 2007) I gave a talk about the Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) and its application to encode ISO 3166 country codes. The revised paper „Encoding changing country codes for the Semantic Web with ISO 3166 and SKOS“ is finally ready to appear in the post-proceedings. The preprint is accessible at http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.3908. I raised three issues (notations, nesting concept schemes, and versioning) that are not included in the current SKOS draft – but the proposed solutions are compliant, beside the nesting of concept schemes with the RDF property skos:member – which could be possible by making skos:ConceptScheme a RDF subclass of skos:Collection. Therefore the paper can also be used as a general introduction to SKOS, especially to encode authority files. More details in the paper and at the public-esw-thes@w3.org mailing list. SKOS is going to become a W3C recommendation this year.