Our Semantic Technology Lab developed a practical tool to browse a taxonomy using the SKOS model. Browsing the RDF data behind the model makes them tangible.

SKOS is a recommendation by W3C to support the use of classification systems like thesauri, taxonomies and subject heading lists in a semantic implementation. In fact it provides a standard way to represent knowledge organization systems using the Resource Description Framework (RDF).

We see more and more of our customers - for example the European Commission – turning to SKOS as the desired modeling language for designing knowledge organization systems. We wanted to find out how this SKOS data could be made available through a browser, so that anybody can navigate this information.

We loaded a SKOS multilingual thesaurus of economical terms into an RDF data store. We used Oracle Spatial - a feature in Oracle 11g - as RDF store and inference engine. Next we built a SKOS web interface component in Java that runs in Tomcat. Communication between Oracle and the web interface is supported by the Oracle Jena adaptor. We now have a tool to browse the data and perform searches. It operates as a client application using the HTTP protocol.

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The SKOS browser makes the relations between concepts explicit through lists. An extra feature is a visualization component, showing how concepts are related to each other by connecting them in graphs.

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This proof of concept combines an interesting set of technologies in a working and functional example. The application’s architecture includes Jena, SPARQL, RDF, Oracle Spatial, reasoning, graph representation,..  We believe it can give teams wishing to develop semantic applications a headstart using this framework. Contact us for more details.

Here’s an interesting related gadget: Firefox released an add-on to indicate the presence of RDF data in a web page: https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/3886