SKOS Use Cases and Requirements

Knowledge organization systems, such as taxonomies, thesauri or subject heading lists, play a fundamental role in information structuring and access. The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group aims at providing a model for representing such vocabularies on the Semantic Web: SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System). This document presents the preparatory work for the 2009 version of SKOS. It lists representative use cases, which were obtained after a dedicated questionnaire was sent to a wide audience. It also features a set of fundamental or secondary requirements derived from these use cases, that have been used to guide the design of SKOS. This document is a companion to the SKOS Reference and the SKOS Primer, which respectively provide the normative reference on SKOS and a user guide for those who would like to represent their concept scheme using SKOS.