Educational vocabulary standards

The following is a (doubtless incomplete) list of educational technology specifications and standards directly relevant to the SIG's work in repositories. No attempt has been made to include all generic metadata or library specifications and standards that may also be relevant to the SIG.

Last revision Aug 2008

W3C SKOS
W3C Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) specifications and standards to support the use of knowledge Organization systems (KOS) such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading systems and taxonomies within the framework of the Semantic Web. http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/skos|max=3|short

IMS VDEX
IMS Vocabulary Definition Exchange (VDEX) defines a grammar for the exchange of various vocabularies, i.e., simple lists of terms, hierarchical lists, thesauri, etc along with information that helps the human interpretation of the meanings of these terms. http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/vdex|max=3|short

Zthes
Zthes is a profile for thesaurus navigation in Z39.50 and SRW; the XML binding allows it to be used to exchange vocabularies in much the way as VDEX, though without the human-readable term descriptions. http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/zthes|max=3|short

CEN Workshop Agreement 14871
Published in October 2003, covering simple value lists; classifications and taxonomies; thesauri; glossaries; dictionaries; ontologies; and natural language, and their use in describing learning objects, in particular in LOM records. Also covers interoperability between vocabularies and is available at CEN Workshop Agreement 14871.