Knowledge organization systems like taxonomies or thesauri can benefit from linked data approaches and vice versa. In recent years SKOS became very popular in various industries due to its simplicity, not only for information retrieval purposes but also for knowledge modelling itself. For many organizations SKOS turned out to be the entry point to the Semantic Web.

A rather novel approach is to use SKOS as means for data integration. In combination with RDF mapping and linked data alignment technologies complex knowledge bases can be built to use them for the following application scenarios which we will demonstrate by using the PoolParty platform.

• How the creation of thesauri can become more efficient when built upon existing linked data sources
• how SKOS thesauri can be aligned with LOD sources and can be published as an LOD source itself
• How linked data mechanisms can be used to improve decentralized vocabulary management
• How SKOS and linked data alignment can be used for efficient schema mapping and value mapping
• How SKOS thesauri can be enriched with linked data to realise semantic search engines in a very efficient way
• How collaborative platforms like Sharepoint or Confluence can benefit from SKOS based knowledge models in combination with linked data