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STW Thesaurus for Economics

Machine Processable Data: Technical Background

To support reuse of the STW Thesaurus for Economics, ZBW not only put it on to the web as HTML pages. An URI was assigned to each descriptor and subject category. These URIs are designed to be persistent identifiers, independent of language or thesaurus version. ZBW will make every effort to keep these URIs accessible and dereferenceable. The URIs can be employed for indexing resources in a consistent way, even if the labels for a concept may change eventually.

The base of this web site is a SKOS representation of the STW which allows to express any information in the thesaurus in a machine-processable way. The SKOS data is embedded into the web pages using RDFa. The Downloads for the STW and the mappings to other vocabularies are provided in SKOS format, too. The semantic extensions for STW are defined under the namespace http://zbw.eu/namespaces/zbw-extensions/ (readable turtle format).

The embedded data makes the STW Thesaurus for Economics part of the Semantic Web, described by Tim Berners-Lee as the "Web of Linked Data". More about the technical background of the STW as semantic web application can be found in this paper.

STW Thesaurus for Economics (v 9.16, 2023-11-20)  ▪  Suggestions and comments to the thesaurus team  ▪ 
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The STW Thesaurus for Economics is licensed under CC BY 4.0.