Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Publishing a Thesaurus on the Semantic Web

Quick Guide to Publishing a Thesaurus on the Semantic Web: "The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries [Semantic Web Activity]. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) [RDF], which provides a simple data formalism for talking about things, their properties, inter-relationships, and categories (classes). For an overview of RDF, see [RDF Concepts]

This document describes in brief how to express the content and structure of a thesaurus, and metadata about a thesaurus, in RDF. Using RDF allows your data to be linked to and/or merged with other RDF data by semantic web applications. In practice, this means that data sources can be distributed across the web in a decentralised way, but still be meaningfully composed and integrated by applications, often in novel and unanticipated ways."