SkoHub - Unleash the full potential of controlled vocabularies

Controlled vocabularies, authority data, and other "Knowledge Organization Systems" (KOS) have long been a central part of knowledge organization in libraries, research and education. They are widely used in different domains supporting the discovery of resources by connecting them to topics. The SkoHub ecosystem, designed and developed by North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Centre (hbz), comprises a growing set of software modules to get optimal benefit from your controlled vocabularies by making use of SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) and other web standards. The core module - SkoHub Vocabs - enables the lightweight publication of knowledge organization systems as Linked Open Data based on SKOS. This facilitates, for example, compliance with FAIR Data principles in Digital Humanities projects or in research data management. SkoHub Vocabs is being used by various stakeholders from a educational, scholarly or library contexts. The module SkoHub Reconcile builds on the work done to develop a web API that data providers can expose, for easing the reconciliation of third-party data to their own identifiers. SkoHub Reconcile is currently under development but already quite mature, supports the simple reconciliation of data with a controlled vocabulary, e.g. by using the widely used software OpenRefine. Use cases include enrichment of less structured data with authoritative identifiers and additional data or entity linking. The SkoHub PubSub module supports a novel approach to knowledge organization systems by turning them into communication hubs for publishers and information seekers. Topics in the form of SKOS concepts become actors in the Fediverse that I one can follow - for example, on the rising microblogging service Mastodon. As soon as new content is published on that topic, I'm notified via a push notification. SkoHub thus seeks to support forms of self-organized social exchange based on recognized web standards and could support in the communication of scientific communities in the future. SkoHub PubSub has been successfully tested in a proof of concept and will be further developed in the future. The hbz has a long track record of providing reliable open metadata infrastructure for libraries and other interested parties. We take over the maintainer duties for SkoHub development and invite engagement by the community of SkoHub users, e.g. by providing bug reports, feature requests or by improving the documentation. To enable community-based development, all SkoHub software is provided under an open license and the development happens in a transparent way on GitHub (see the CONTRIBUTING.md at https://github.com/skohub-io/skohub-vocabs/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md and the Kanban board at https://github.com/orgs/skohub-io/projects/4/views/1). The presentation will introduce the SkoHub software ecosystem and illustrate its possibilities with practical use cases from the fields of libraries, research, education and standardization.