The SKOS API is a Java interface and implementation for the W3C Simple Knowledge Organisation System SKOS. For more information about SKOS see here. An implementation of the SKOS API is provided which uses the OWL 2 API, at present you will need to obtain the OWL API seperately from the OWL 2 website. [UPDATE 12-09-2011] The current release of the SKOS API has been deprecated, a new version_3 developer branch is available in the SVN repository that works with the latest OWL API v3.
For more information please contact the user group at skos-dev@googlegroups.com
The SKOS API is open source and is available under the LGPL License
The SKOS API includes the following components:
An API for the major SKOS constructs and an efficient in-memory reference implementation based on the OWL 2 API
Abstract data model for working for SKOS that avoids commitment to any of the concrete syntaxes, such as RDF
RDF/XML parser and writer
OWL/XML parser and writer
OWL Functional Syntax parser and writer
Turtle parser and writer
Support for extending the underlying SKOS data model via the OWL 2 API
Support for integration with reasoners such as Pellet and FaCT++
Range of convenience methods for working with SKOS
OWL reasoner engines can contribute with the semantic enrichment over ontologies. The manner in which this knowledge is represented in OWL has been an obstacle to incorporate this semantic features in the object-oriented paradigms. JASB architecture pretends to be a bridge for joining this two different worlds. This platform offers a connection point in which the object instances of the object-oriented programming could have semantic features provides by mean of the reasoning processes available in OWL arena.
The architecture is composed by two clearly differenciated tools, each one is focussing on different objective.
In the logical sequence of a software development, the first tool covers the statical aspect of the inclusion of semantic features into object-oriented application. Thus, in the following picture can be seen the architecture for thisthe first tool, the JASB compiler.