The AIMS team as part of its work in promoting good practices in information management participated in the development of the new draft standard XKOS at the Dagstuhl workshop “Semantic Statistics for Social, Behavioural, and Economic Sciences: Leveraging the DDI Model for the Linked Data Web” in Wadern, Germany, October 15-19, 2012. XKOS is an extension to the popular Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), a W3C Recommendation, to meet the needs of classification schemes.

Improving visibility & discoverability of statistical data

XKOS is designed to facilitate the interoperability of micro and macro data both within and without the statistics domain and to be complementary to existing standards such as SDMX, DDI and RDF Data Cube. This proposed extension to SKOS may well become the basis for improving the visibility and discoverability of statistical data on the semantic web as well as a mechanism to maintain and disseminate classification schemes according to a standard, cross-domain, machine-readable format.

XKOS to be published as a W3C working draft

A product of the combined efforts of organizations such as the Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques (INSEE), the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) of the National University of Ireland, the Minnesota Population Center (MPC) of the University of Minnesota, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (GESIS), the Open Data Foundation (ODaF) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN, XKOS will soon be published as a W3C working draft and be open for comments from the statistical and information management communities.

"Semantic Statistics for Social, Behavioural, and Economic Sciences"

The Dagstuhl workshop "Semantic Statistics for Social, Behavioural, and Economic Sciences" examined the DDI metadata model used in the Social, Behavioural, and Economic (SBE) sciences, and designed an implementation of that model using the Semantic Web standards (RDF, OWL, etc.). Invited participants represented the user community (data librarians, archivists, researchers, data producers), statisticians, DDI experts, and experts in the Semantic Web technologies and standards.

The workshop took place at the Leibniz Center for Informatics (GESIS), Schloss Dagstuhl (Germany), a non-profit center that is a member of the Leibniz Association and is funded jointly by the German federal government and a number of state governments (similar to GESIS).