ATHENA is one of the projects building EUROPEANA, the European Digital Library to be inaugurated in mid 2010 [ http://group.europeana.eu ]

The content partners in the ATHENA project in Israel are the Israel National Library, the Israel State Archive and the Israel Museum Jerusalem. MAKASH is the official Israel partner ATHENA.

SKOS is a W3C recommendation for expressing controlled vocabularies in RDF. It enable correspondences to be established between concepts from different schemas. SKOS represented vocabularies establish hubs of knowledge in the rapidly evolving Semantic Web of Linked Open Data. Vocabularies related to Israel and the Jewish People should be represented in SKOS enabling the expression, description and access to knowledge of such particular interest.

The Israel Internet Society through its W3C Office expressed interest in the proposal presented by MAKASH to disseminate the use of SKOS in Israel. A first step in this potential collaboration is the workshop with Regine Stein, Head of Information Technology at the German Documentation Center for Art History.

Announcements related to the SKOS Workshop, January 11, 2010

• Program and invitation  

• Examples of metadata for contents from Israel in ATHENA prepared by Dr. Allison Kupietzky, Israel Museum Jerusalem 

• List of participants

Background for the workshop

• Presentation by Regine Stein at  the SKOS Athena WP4  workshop, Rome 16 Jul 2009  

• CDWA Lite and museumdat 

• The Cataloging Cultural Objects Experience: Codifying Practice for the Cultural Heritage Community  

• CRM in praxis

Pre-SKOS Resources

 Thesaurus and Controlled Vocabularies

• Introductory Tutorial on Thesaurus Construction

• Thesaurus Information from the American Society of Indexers

• How do I build a thesaurus

 URI – Uniform Resource Identifiers

• Cool URIs for the Semantic Web

 Basic XML

• A gentle introduction to XML

• Introduction to XML

 Basic RDF

• Introduction to RDF

• Video from ISOC-IL workshop with Liyang Yu, author of the book “Introduction to the Semantic Web”

SKOS – Simple Knowledge Organization System

• SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System – W3C Home Page

• SKOS in Wikipedia

• SKOS primer

SKOS Tools

• ThManager is a Java open-source application for creating and visualizing SKOS vocabularies

• SKOSEd - Thesaurus editor for the Semantic Web is an open source plugin for the Protégé    OWL ontology editor that supports authoring SKOS vocabularies. 

Some SKOS Applications

W3C SKOS Implementation Report, May 19th 2009 

SKOS Based Web Services from Hypermedia Research Unit, University of Glamorgan

Presentations at the ATHENA WP4 SKOS Workshop (Roma, Italy, June 2009)

Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus Skosified

By Axel Vitzthum, Museen Schleswig-Holstein (Athena WP4, Rome, June 2009)

A method to convert Thesauri to SKOS – VU University, Amsterdam 

Include three examples: 

• UK Public Service Vocabulary; 

• Dutch GTAA (Common Thesaurus for Audiovisual Archives) ; 

• MESH Medical Subject Headings