The results of the survey titled “Do controlled vocabularies matter?” which was conducted by Semantic Web Company from May until June 2011 are public now. Over 150 participants from 27 countries draw a picture of the current and future usage behaviour in the realm of controlled vocabularies.

Here are three of the most interesting outcomes of this questionnaire – the whole report can be found and downloaded on issuu:

Do you think enterprises and other organizations can significantly benefit from using Linked Data?

The answer is a clear YES. A subsequent question also reveals that all kind of organisation sizes have about the same opinion concerning linked data. Only few people think that linked data is a “niche thing”. In general it can be said, that over 90% of the participants think that most or at least some organisations can benefit from using linked data.

Do you think that search engines which utilize thesauri to improve results will become main-stream

The results of this question are amazing: Two thirds of the participants think that thesaurus based search is already or will become main-stream in the near future. Scepticism towards this development seems to be low – at least it can be stated, that a clear majority thinks that thesaurus based search engines will become main stream in the near future.

How important is the usage of standards like SKOS for controlled vocabularies?

The results speak for themselves. The majority of the participants are convinced that standards like SKOS are important for their daily work. In August 2009 W3C announced the new SKOS standard – now, nearly two years after, it looks like this standard has well arrived. 48.7% stated that standards like SKOS are very important and 29.1% voted for “relevant”.

As an overall result of the survey it can be stated: Semantic Web community has done a great job to convince the controlled vocabulary people to benefit from SKOS and linked data – on the other side only 3-5% are aware of SPARQL as a valuable resource to build standard APIs around controlled vocabularies to lower costs when implementing such knowledge organization systems.

Many thanks to all participants of this survey!