SKOS was first developed as an output of the Thesaurus Activity Work Package, in the Semantic Web Advanced Development for Europe (SWAD-Europe) project [1]. SWAD-Europe was funded by the European Community, and part of the Information Society Technologies programme. The project was designed to support W3C's Semantic Web Activity through research, demonstrators and outreach efforts conducted by the five project partners, ERCIM, the ILRT at Bristol University, HP Labs, CCLRC and Stilo [2] .
The first release of SKOS Core and SKOS Mapping were published at the end of 2003, along with other deliverables on RDF encoding of multilingual thesauri [3] and thesaurus mapping [4].
Semantic Web Activity (2004-2005)
Following the termination of SWAD-Europe, SKOS effort was supported by the W3C Semantic Web Activity [5] in the framework of the Best Practice and Deployment Working Group [6]. During this period, focus was put both on consolidation of SKOS Core, and development of practical guidelines for porting and publishing thesauri for the Semantic Web.
Current Status and Roadmap (2006-2008)
SKOS is a work in progress, and the main published documents ? the SKOS Core Guide [7], the SKOS Core Vocabulary Specification [8], and the Quick Guide to Publishing a Thesaurus on the Semantic Web [9] ? have W3C Working Draft status. The main editors of SKOS are Alistair Miles [10] and Dan Brickley [11].
The new Semantic Web Deployment Working Group [12], chartered for two years (May 2006 - April 2008), has put in its charter to push SKOS forward on the W3C Recommendation track. The roadmap projects SKOS as a Candidate Recommendation by the end of 2007, and as a Proposed Recommendation in the first quarter of 2008. The main issues to solve are determining its precise scope of use, and its articulation with other RDF languages and standards used in libraries (such as Dublin Core) [13][14].
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