The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has introduced a new standard designed to make it easier to search for documents and information. The Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) serves as a model for expressing basic structure and content of concepts such as classifications, thesauri, and taxonomies. Managers of large collections of items would be able to use the standard to link vocabularies to the Semantic Web. SKOS will provide organizations with new categories for describing and discovering information. “Active participation from the library and information science community in the development of SKOS over the past seven years has been key to ensuring that SKOS meets a variety of needs,” says Thomas Baker, co-chair of W3C's Semantic Web Deployment Working Group, which published SKOS. “One goal in creating SKOS was to provide new uses for well-established knowledge organization systems by providing a bridge to the linked data cloud.”
From “W3C Bridging Knowledge Organization Systems to Linked Data,” InfoWorld (08/19/09) by Paul Krill