Notes

1. Concepts in VIVO are modeled using the SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) ontology.  SKOS is quite simple, and is a good place to start for those learning about ontologies, and how VIVO uses ontologies to represent information as triples in RDF.  See The SKOS Primer, a readable introduction to SKOS and how it is represented in RDF.

2. A concept is typically represented in VIVO as two triples, one declaring the URI of the concept as a skos:Concept, and one providing a text label for the concept.  A third triple may use the skos:prefLabel to repeat the text label for those applications expecting the concept to have a preferred label.  The triples might look like those below:

   <http://vivo.myschool.edu> rdf:type skos:Concept . <http://vivo.myschool.edu> rdfs:label "Molecular Biology"^^@en . <http://vivo.myschool.edu> skos:prefLabel "Molecular Biology"^^@en .

3. Concepts are used throughout VIVO to indicate research and subject areas for people and other entities.