Finding Quality Issues in SKOS Vocabularies
This addresses quality issues in SKOS vocabularies for taxonomists, but it is incremental as it builds on existing specifications.
The paper tackled the problem of varying quality in SKOS vocabularies, which reduces their cross-system applicability, by developing computable quality checking functions implemented in the qSKOS tool; they analyzed 15 vocabularies and found possible quality issues in all of them.
The Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a standard model for controlled vocabularies on the Web. However, SKOS vocabularies often differ in terms of quality, which reduces their applicability across system boundaries. Here we investigate how we can support taxonomists in improving SKOS vocabularies by pointing out quality issues that go beyond the integrity constraints defined in the SKOS specification. We identified potential quantifiable quality issues and formalized them into computable quality checking functions that can find affected resources in a given SKOS vocabulary. We implemented these functions in the qSKOS quality assessment tool, analyzed 15 existing vocabularies, and found possible quality issues in all of them.