With more and more thesauri, classifications and other knowledge organization systems being published as Linked Data using SKOS, the question arises how best to make them available on the web. While just publishing the Linked Data triples is possible using a number of RDF publishing tools, those tools are not very well suited for SKOS data, because they cannot support term-based searching and lookup.

This webinar presents Skosmos, an open source web­-based SKOS vocabulary browser that uses a SPARQL endpoint as its back­end. It can be used by e.g. libraries and archives as a publishing platform for controlled vocabularies such as thesauri, lightweight ontologies, classifications and authority files. The Finnish national thesaurus and ontology service Finto, operated by the National Library of Finland, is built using Skosmos.

Skosmos provides a multilingual user interface for browsing and searching the data and for visualizing concept hierarchies. The user interface has been developed by analyzing the results of repeated usability tests. All of the SKOS data is made available as Linked Data. A developer­-friendly REST API is also available providing access for using vocabularies in other applications such as annotation systems.

We will describe what kind of infrastructure is necessary for Skosmos and how to set it up for your own SKOS data. We will also present examples where Skosmos is being used around the world.

Skill level: Intermediate. A working knowledge of SKOS and a basic knowledge of triple stores and SPARQL queries are presumed.