The SKOS API is a Java interface and implementation for the W3C Simple Knowledge Organisation System SKOS. For more information about SKOS see here. An implementation of the SKOS API is provided which uses the OWL 2 API, at present you will need to obtain the OWL API seperately from the OWL 2 website. The SKOS APIs status is pre-alpha, the code is being actively developed at the moment and some of the core interfaces defined have not yet been finalised.

Any developers who are interested in developing SKOS applications and like the design of this API please e-mail me if you are interested in getting developer access to the source code. simon.jupp [at] manchester.ac.uk

The SKOS API is open source and is available under the LGPL License

The SKOS API includes the following components:

• An API for the major SKOS constructs and an efficient in-memory reference implementation based on the OWL 2 API
• Abstract data model for working for SKOS that avoids commitment to any of the concrete syntaxes, such as RDF
• RDF/XML parser and writer
• OWL/XML parser and writer
• OWL Functional Syntax parser and writer
• Turtle parser and writer
• Support for extending the underlying SKOS data model via the OWL 2 API
• Support for integration with reasoners such as Pellet and FaCT++
• Range of convinience methods for working with SKOS

The initial work was developed as part of the CO-ODE project and the EU Sealife project