The benefits of working with RDF and SKOS

The ARDC Vocabulary Services support the publication of vocabularies in a wide range of formats. For example, when you create a vocabulary in Research Vocabularies Australia, you can upload vocabulary data provided in a text file, in a PDF file, or in more than a dozen other formats. When the vocabulary is published, that vocabulary data is made available for download through the RVA portal page for the vocabulary.

However, there is special support for vocabularies encoded using RDF in general, and the SKOS data model in particular.

For vocabularies encoded in RDF, vocabulary data can be imported into an individual RDF triple store (implemented as OpenRDF Sesame). That triple store supports the following features:

• download in all of the formats supported by OpenRDF Sesame: e.g., RDF/XML, Turtle, etc., and

• a SPARQL endpoint.

Download links and the URL of the SPARQL endpoint are provided on the RVA portal page for the vocabulary.

There is additional support for vocabularies encoded using the SKOS data model:

• The ARDC vocabulary editor (PoolParty) creates and manages SKOS vocabularies. For further details about PoolParty's use of SKOS, please see PoolParty's prerequisites for imported SKOS data.

• SKOS-encoded vocabularies published through RVA have a special "browse tree" display that shows the hierarchy of concepts based on the SKOS broader/narrower relations.

• The Linked Data API (SISSVoc) endpoints for concept schemes, collections, and concepts work correctly for (and only for) SKOS-encoded vocabularies. (See Linked Data API.)

• The Vocabulary Widget only works for SKOS-encoded vocabularies.

Further information about SKOS can be obtained from these sources:

• The SKOS Primer: https://www.w3.org/TR/skos-primer/

• The SKOS Reference: https://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/

Please note that the ARDC Vocabulary Services provide end-to-end support for vocabularies managed in PoolParty that use SKOS-XL predicates. Please see Support for SKOS-XL.