Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, 2nd Edition

Concept Schemes

SKOS includes the notion of a Concept Scheme. A concept scheme is a largely informal collection of concepts, corresponding roughly to a particular thesaurus or knowledge organization system. While concept schemes have little formal definition, they are useful for conveying the intention of the publisher of one or more thesauri. Common practice for using concept schemes is mixed. Some authorities (e.g., AGROVOC) publish their whole vocabulary as a single concept scheme. Others (e.g., the Library of Congress) publish each of their vocabularies using a separate concept scheme corresponding in part to different licensing controls on the different vocabularies. The National Agriculture Library uses several concept schemes, one for ...