Taxonomy Standards
Standards are published for thesaurus and ontology construction, exports (in SKOS format), and several functions in website construction. Other web functions and most metadata issues are represented by informal, and sometimes competing, "standardization" agreements.
ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005
Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies
Presents guidelines and conventions for the content, display, construction, testing, maintenance, and management of monolingual controlled vocabularies. It focuses on controlled vocabularies that are used for the representation of content objects in knowledge organization systems including lists, synonym rings, taxonomies, and thesauri.
ISO 2788:1986
Guidelines for the Establishment and Development of Monolingual Thesauri
The recommendations are intended to ensure consistent practice within a single indexing agency, or between different agencies (for example, members of a network). These recommendations relate to monolingual thesauri, without reference to the special requirements of multilingual thesauri. (Note: currently under review for update)
ISO 5964:1985
Guidelines for the Establishment and Development of Multilingual Thesauri
Should be used in conjunction with ISO 2788, and regarded as an extension of the scope of the monolingual guidelines. The majority of procedures and recommendations contained in ISO 2788 are equally valied for a multilingual thesaurus. This applies particularly to general procedures, for example, the forms of terms, the basic thesauri relationships, and management operations such as evaluation and maintenance. Distinction is made between preferred terms and non-preferred terms.
www.iso.ch/
Thesaurus Export format: SKOS Core Guide - W3C Working Draft 2 November 2005
SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) Core provides a model for expressing the basic structure and content of concept schemes such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies, 'folksonomies', other types of controlled vocabulary, and also concept schemes embedded in glossaries and terminologies.
The SKOS Core Vocabulary is an application of the Resource Description Framework (RDF), that can be used to express a concept scheme as an RDF graph. Using RDF allows data to be linked to and/or merged with other data, enabling data sources to be distributed across the web, but still be meaningfully composed and integrated.
This document is a guide using the SKOS Core Vocabulary, for readers who already have a basic understanding of RDF concepts.
www.w3.org/TR/swbp-skos-core-guide/
Resource Description Framework (RDF)
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) integrates a variety of applications from library catalogs and world-wide directories to syndication and aggregation of news, software, and content to personal collections of music, photos, and events using XML as an interchange syntax. The RDF specifications provide a lightweight ontology system to support the exchange of knowledge on the Web.
The W3C Semantic Web Activity Statement explains W3C's plans for RDF, including the RDF Core WG, Web Ontology and the RDF Interest Group.
OWL Web Ontology Language
Guide
W3C Recommendation 10 February 2004
The World Wide Web as it is currently constituted resembles a poorly mapped geography. Our insight into the documents and capabilities available are based on keyword searches, abetted by clever use of document connectivity and usage patterns. The sheer mass of this data is unmanageable without powerful tool support. In order to map this terrain more precisely, computational agents require machine-readable descriptions of the content and capabilities of Web accessible resources. These descriptions must be in addition to the human-readable versions of that information.
The OWL Web Ontology Language is intended to provide a language that can be used to describe the classes and relations between them that are inherent in Web documents and applications.
This document demonstrates the use of the OWL language to
- formalize a domain by defining classes and properties of those classes,
- define individuals and assert properties about them, and
- reason about these classes and individuals to the degree permitted by the formal semantics of the OWL language.
The sections are organized to present an incremental definition of a set of classes, properties and individuals, beginning with the fundamentals and proceeding to more complex language components.