A proposal for computer science thesaurus: organizing knowledge elements with skos

Objectives: We consider the Knowledge Organization as an interdisciplinary activity of Information Science and Computer Science that enables the knowledge representation in Semantic Web environments. In the face of this interdisciplinarity, this paper presents the choices and efforts spent to develop a Computer Science Thesaurus. Methods: as an applied research, an ontology development process is used, considering that ontologies and thesaurus are Knowledge Organization Systems with correlated activities. Results: based on a Semantic Web model named Simple Knowledge Organization System - SKOS, the thesaurus is published on the Web of Data and can be accessed from the http://lod.unicentro.br/sparql endpoint. We admit that the audience of the developed Knowledge Organization System is composed by professionals, teachers, researchers, undergraduate/graduate students, and the use of the thesaurus is useful for scientific communication among these actors. Conclusions: we observed that the ontology development processes can be also used for thesaurus' development. In addition, the use of SKOS as a model for developing thesaurus shown be feasible, according to the premises of digital resources organization and representation.