RE: [Proposal][SKOS-Core] handling top concepts

Just to add something here on an issue that came up on the wiki ...

[From the wiki]
A top concept is defined by the absence of skos:broader terms. One can
easily determine that whether a concept is a top concept.

... i.e. arguing that no explicit mechanism for identifying top concepts is
required.

I think there are two counter-arguments to this, the first from Stella's
mail today ...

[Stella]
And, should  "Top term" be assigned to a term/concept at all? As was
pointed out, to do so is a bit redundant because you can infer it from
the absence of a BT relationship. But in practice I find that people
trying to implement thesauri ( and especially taxonomies) find it very
helpful to be able to identify the top term entries rapidly, directly,
without having to look for the absence of something. System
administrators typically have no previous experience with thesauri and
they want simple things to help them manage the data. So when thesaurus
data are being exchanged or distributed, it is good to give them all the
labels/attributes/properties that will speed up the implementation.

... And secondly, a practical issue if using RDF query languages, you can't
use e.g. RDQL to query for something by the absence of properties, only by
the presence of them.

Al.

---
Alistair Miles
Research Associate
CCLRC - Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Building R1 Room 1.60
Fermi Avenue
Chilton
Didcot
Oxfordshire OX11 0QX
United Kingdom
Email:        a.j.miles@rl.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1235 445440



> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-esw-thes-request@w3.org
> [mailto:public-esw-thes-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Dan Brickley
> Sent: 04 August 2004 17:55
> To: Miles, AJ (Alistair) 
> Cc: 'public-esw-thes@w3.org'
> Subject: Re: [Proposal][SKOS-Core] handling top concepts
> 
> 
> 
> * Miles, AJ (Alistair)  <A.J.Miles@rl.ac.uk> [2004-08-04 17:27+0100]
> > > Thanks, this identifies a discomfort I've had w/ 
> interactions between 
> > > 'top concept' notion and thesaurus mixing. At heart you're saying 
> > > 'top concept' is a relation between a a 
> scheme/dataset/thesaurus and
> > > a concept. Makes sense to me.
> > > 
> > > So would this be:
> > > 
> > > <owl:FunctionalProperty 
> > > rdf:about="http:///....../skos/core#hasTopConcept"/>
> > > 
> > > ie. anything that has a skos:hasTopConcept has only one 
> such thing?
> > > 
> > 
> > Thanks Dan.
> > 
> > The original idea was that a scheme has several skos:hasTopConcept
> > properties, pointing to the top level concepts for that 
> scheme (i.e. so not
> > functional).
> > 
> > If we made skos:hasTopConcept functional, each scheme would 
> have to be
> > defined with a single root concept ... do you think it's 
> worth doing it that
> > way?
> 
> Ah, righto. I was reading too much into 'top'.
> 
> Yeah seems more useful to have several, otherwise they'll all just be 
> thing/entity/object/resource etc...
> 
> I'm not 100% clear on the use case for this construct, I guess.
> 
> Dan
>

Received on Thursday, 5 August 2004 06:55:21 UTC