curate-vocabularies

name	curate-vocabularies
description	Use when discovering, researching, triaging, or maintaining the list of candidate SKOS vocabularies for skosdex — i.e. updating third_party/skos/CANDIDATES.md, verifying a scheme's license, or deciding whether a vocabulary can be bundled or must stay metadata-only.
license	Apache-2.0

Curate candidate vocabularies

The backlog of SKOS schemes lives in third_party/skos/CANDIDATES.md. This skill keeps it accurate and decides what may be onboarded.

Workflow

1. Discover candidates from registries: BARTOC (https://bartoc.org/), Linked Open Vocabularies (https://lov.linkeddata.es/), the W3C SKOS/Datasets wiki, and domain ontology portals (AgroPortal, BioPortal).
2. Verify the license at the source — do not trust third-party summaries. Find the publisher's own download/terms page and record the exact license.
3. Classify into the gate that controls bundling:

   class	examples	container	static (demo/Pages)
   public-domain	CC0, US-gov works	✅	✅
   open	CC BY, ODC-By, OGL, Apache/MIT	✅	✅
   copyleft	CC BY-SA	✅ container-only	❌
   noncommercial	CC BY-NC, BY-NC-ND	✅ container-only	❌
   proprietary / unknown	all rights reserved; ODbL (not granted)	❌	❌
   Container-only (policy v2, 2026-06-10): license explicit in meta.ttl +
   manifest.json; no semantic changes (N-Quads formatting only); never in
   static artifacts — the demo builder filters these schemes automatically.
   When in doubt, treat as not bundleable and mark "To investigate".

4. Record the scheme in the right table in CANDIDATES.md with publisher, license, class, formats, and a working source URL. Note the review date.
5. Onboard (graduate) by creating third_party/skos/<slug>/meta.ttl via the add-skos-scheme skill. For large dumps, start with skosdex:bundle false.

Rules

• Licensing is non-negotiable: every bundled scheme carries an explicit license in meta.ttl; copyleft/NC data is container-only; proprietary and ODbL data is never committed or bundled — only its metadata.
• Prefer SKOS-native serializations (Turtle / N-Triples / N-Quads); n3 cannot parse RDF/XML, so RDF/XML-only sources need conversion (riot, rapper) or a per-scheme helper in the scheme's tools/ folder.
• Keep the "Last reviewed" date in CANDIDATES.md current when you touch it.