We are all unwitting authors and users of them. They are a reflection of how the human mind makes sense of complexity and structure. They are embedded in so many technologies we develop to solve problems and serve information to end users.

Taxonomies and thesauri have been around for a long time and, nowadays, in the Information Age we are exploiting taxonomy and thesaurus structures to architect and organise data and capture semantics in computational form.

This course provides a practical deep-dive on how to apply the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) - a standard Semantic Web vocabulary developed and maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - to construct controlled vocabularies, taxonomies and thesauri.

SKOS comes with a rich set of building blocks to develop concept trees as hierarchies, as well as their breakdown and lineage into finer-grained concepts. SKOS also comes with several other Knowledge Organisation System (KOS) structures to define concept schemes, collections, semantic relations for concept associations and semantic mapping relations that allow the curation, reconciliation and mediation of entities across multiple taxonomical models.

SKOS is a key asset to be learnt by anyone who has an interest in information architecture that underpins applications intended for semantic search, metadata management, enterprise vocabularies, data cataloguing, reference schemas, and many more.