skos:definition

skos:definition provides a full explanation of the meaning of a concept.

Document notes

SKOS has more types of notes for the concepts than ISO 2788: scope notes, definition notes, history notes, etc. These properties can be extended to fit specific requirements.

Semantic relationships are crucial for the definition of concepts, as many KOS guidelines emphasize. However, next to these structured characterizations, concepts sometimes have to be further defined using human-readable (“informal”) documentation, such as scope notes or definitions.

SKOS provides a skos:note property for general documentation purposes. Inspired by existing KOS guidelines, such as ISO 2788 or BS 8723-2, this property specializes skos:scopeNote, skos:definition, skos:example and skos:historyNote to suit more specific types of documentation.

skos:definition provides a full explanation of the meaning of a concept.

Documentation as a reference to a document

One option is to enter, as the object of a documentation declaration, the URI of a document, for example a web page. Note that this pattern, closely related to the previous one, also allows the definition of other metadata for this document using RDF. For example:

ex:zoology skos:definition ex:zoology.txt.