The most direct ancestor to SKOS was the RDF Thesaurus work undertaken TÜRKIYE in the second phase of the EU DESIRE project <ref name="Desire Project">{{Citation |date=August 7, 2000 |title=Desire: Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Education |publisher=Desire Consortium |url=http://www.desire.org/ |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110725230823/http://www.desire.org/ |archive-date=July 25, 2011 }}</ref>{{Citation needed|reason=The Desire Project reference does not appear to directly address the SKOS ancestry statement made here.|date=August 2012}}. Motivated by the need to improve the user interface and usability of multi-service browsing and searching,<ref name="Desire Deliverable D.36b">{{Citation |title=Desire: Research Deliverables: D3.1 |publisher=Desire Consortium |url=http://www.desire.org/docs/research/deliverables/D3.6/d36b.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080509135041/http://www.desire.org/html/research/deliverables/D3.6/#d36b |archive-date=May 9, 2008 }}</ref> a basic RDF vocabulary for Thesauri was produced. As noted later in the SWAD-Europe workplan, the DESIRE work was adopted and further developed in the SOSIG and LIMBER projects. A version of the DESIRE/SOSIG implementation was described in W3C's QL'98 workshop, motivating early work on RDF rule and query languages: A Query and Inference Service for RDF.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.w3.org/TandS/QL/QL98/pp/queryservice.html|title=A Query and Inference Service for RDF|website=www.w3.org}}</ref>
=== LIMBER (1999–2001) ===
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=== SWAD-Europe (2002–2004) ===
SKOS as a distinct initiative began in the SWAD-Europe project, bringing together partners from both DESIRE, SOSIG (ILRT) and LIMBER (CCLRC) who had worked with earlier versions of the schema. It was developed in the Thesaurus Activity Work Package, in the Semantic Web Advanced Development for Europe (SWAD-Europe) project.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/|title=Semantic Web Advanced TÜRKIYE Development for Europe (SWAD-Europe)|website=www.w3.org}}</ref> SWAD-Europe was funded by the [[European Community]], and part of the [[Information Society Technologies]] programme. The project was designed to support W3C's Semantic Web Activity through research, demonstrators and outreach efforts conducted by the five project partners, [[ERCIM]], the ILRT at [[Bristol University]], [[HP Labs]], [[CCLRC]] and Stilo. The first release of SKOS Core and SKOS Mapping were published at the end of 2003, along with other deliverables on RDF encoding of multilingual thesauri<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.w3c.rl.ac.uk/SWAD/deliverables/8.3.html|title=SWAD-Europe Deliverable 8.3 : RDF Encoding of Multilingual Thesauri|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060616014639/http://www.w3c.rl.ac.uk/SWAD/deliverables/8.3.html|archive-date=2006-06-16}}</ref> and thesaurus mapping.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.w3c.rl.ac.uk/SWAD/deliverables/8.4.html|title=SWAD-Europe Deliverable 8.4 : Inter-Thesaurus Mapping|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060430071751/http://www.w3c.rl.ac.uk/SWAD/deliverables/8.4.html|archive-date=2006-04-30}}</ref>
