Taxonomy Manager for Managing Specializations?

[Alberto]

As we start to create more and more "specialized" objects, we are starting to lose track of the definitions behind these specializations. We also have groups of specializations and using prefixes in their names for added context, but again, these are a bit rudimentary solutions.

Last I had to look on the market for a taxonomy tool, there were tools at either extreme (small, limited functionality and/or behemoth complex tools).  I wonder if anyone knows of any easy, accessible, easy-learning curve tools  --preferably one based on a standard-- to manage taxonomies/ontologies that could play well with managing Specializations within Archi models.

[Alberto]

I started looking into this and I've found a few things which I'm going to share out loud in case anyone has thoughts or experience and can chime in.

Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a W3C recommendation and seems to be one of the most widely adopted standards for representing and managing knowledge organization systems such as taxonomies, thesauri, and classification schemes, there are a few other similar standards and initiatives like Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI). Google Trends shows higher trends for SKOS in Europe while DCMI seems more prevalent in USA.

Diving into SKOS I found two tools that implement SKOS: TemaTres, Protégé, PoolParty. I've tried Protégé before and Ontologies have a bit of a learning curve, PoolParty is a full fledged commercial tool of semantic applications with a 30 day trial but no "community" version, so I decided to explore TemaTres as it's open-source and requires Apache/PHP/MySQL which is a stack I'm familiar with. The good news is that it is easy and there are a number of functionalities which I find really useful like the ability to add remote vocabularies. Publishing the taxonomy via API, RDF, & SPARQL, etc.

I see a lot of use cases for being able to publish a managed vocabulary, particularly among a team of IT Analysts, so I find that avenue worth exploring, however, I don't have the entire picture as to how to leverage TemaTres/RDF/SPARQL to manage Archi Specializations but I'm sure jArchi will play a key role is putting all this together.

Again, if anyone has thoughts around this, I'm all ears.