Represent Changes of Knowledge Organization Systems on the Semantic Web

Abstract

Traditional knowledge organization systems (KOS) including thesauri, classification schemes, taxonomies, subject heading systems, name authorities, and other lists of terms and codes have been playing important roles in indexing, information organization, and retrieval. With the advent of the semantic web, a large number of them have been converted into Linked Open Data (LOD) datasets. Since the Simple Knowledge Organization Systems (SKOS) and SKOS eXtension for Labels (SKOS-XL) are languages for representation of knowledge organization systems, they have been applied to knowledge organization systems. In this article, the issues surrounding changes, versioning control, and evolution of KOS are investigated. From KOS services providers and consumers perspectives, this study focuses on representation of changes on the semantic web.