The Use of SKOS Vocabularies in Digital Repositories: The DSpace Case

Thesauri are concept schemes that help in efficiently characterizing and retrieving items from digital libraries. SKOS is a data model that provides a standardized way to represent thesauri-and controlled vocabularies in general-using Resource Description Framework. A digital repository system that can inherently ingest and handle thesauri, although not in SKOS format, is DSpace. SKOS support in DSpace is implemented thanks to an add-on, provided by the University of Minho. Our initial objective was to apply this add-on to a running DSpace instance. We then tested this updated DSpace installation using a real vocabulary: the Thesaurus of Greek Terms for which we took on the task of bringing it in SKOS. As a final step, we tried to tackle with arising problems and to propose solutions, which are mostly based on the Semantic Web techniques.