Developing Use Cases for a (RDF-based) Thesaurus Service

[Following a SWADE meeting with Alistair Miles, CCLRC, Dave Beckett, ILRT]
Can I kick this off (re the requirements spec & implementation of a 
thesaurus service)?

Obviously feel free to disagree/refine any of what I state here. It's a bit 
off the cuff.

I think our scope includes :
a) A thesaurus service accessible to the end-user via a browser
b) A "3rd party" thesaurus service, available for M2M networking

The set of "questions" that might be asked of either type of service seem 
to be the same for both & to include:

[* asking for information pertaining to a single thesaurus *]
- "give me the preferred term for some concept X in some thesaurus Y"
- "give me the non-preferred term(s) for some concept X in some thesaurus Y"
- "give me the scope note for some concept X in some thesaurus Y"
- "give me the broader/narrower/related term for some term Z in some 
thesaurus Y"
[nb use & use for]
[ - perhaps some further questions based around the idea of asking for the 
*type* of relations between hierarchical terms within a thesaurus for 
example 'broader-generic', 'broader-partitive' (part-of) as in your 
document, Alistair? Or are we keeping that sort of data "behind the 
scenes"?]
-  "give me metadata about thesaurus Y (s.a. it's language, it's creator 
???)"

[* asking for information re mappings between thesauri *]
- "give me the equivalent term(s) for X in some target thesaurus/thesauri 
(if it exists), or partial equivalent if it exists"
[& scope here - if we hope for a proof-of-concept scenario where some human 
& semi-automated effort has gone into "preparing" hierarchical KOS's that 
employ different types of subsumption rules - for precise questions about 
mapped thesauri, using properties s.a. "overlapsWith", "disjointWith" etc 
as mentioned in your document, Alistair?]

- also, need to provide query support re AND/OR etc re post-coordination, 
or is this out of scope?

USE CASES for a)
Jim Hendler's use case (from rdf-ig I think) - marking up web resources 
using a thesaurus service
SOSIG's use case - marking up resources for a specific user community - 
social sciences in this case
Alistair Mile's use case - tool support for better searching and also 
browsing using web search engines s.a. Google  [similar scenario applies 
e.g. to SOSIG end user]

USE CASES for b)
Cross-search (re ("invisible") better query recall across a set of data 
repositories, e.g. this would extend a tool like SPP's xsearch)
Cross-browse (so end-user can "seamlessly" browse a hierarchy of categories 
represented across many data repositories in order to refine their search 
terms, say. ie 2 or more KOS's have been "federated")

Apologies in advance for any ambiguous terminology!

Nikki

----------------------
NJ Rogers, Technical Researcher
(Semantic Web Applications Developer)
Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT)
Email:nikki.rogers@bristol.ac.uk
Tel: +44(0)117 9287096 (Direct)
Tel: +44(0)117 9287193 (Office)

Received on Thursday, 18 September 2003 12:35:38 UTC