RE: [Proposal][SKOS-Core] New vocab for arrays of concepts

Just a brief note on two points in Danny's message:

1. "The label of the collection in your example: "Aircraft by function"
(a node label or guide term, the Wiki tells me)"
The thesaurus standards (ANSI/NISO Z39.19; ISO 2788; and the forthcoming
BS8723 all favour calling these things 'node labels' and their function
(according to ISO 2788 and BS8723) is either to name a facet or to
indicate the characteristic of division of an array. They are sometimes
called 'facet indicators', but this is an erroneous use of the latter
term. The AAT (Art & Architecture Thesaurus) calls them 'guide terms'
but only some of  the AAT guide terms function as node labels; others
are just dummy terms (i.e. deprecated for indexing) creating steps in
the hierarchical display. A number of other thesauri in the museums
sector have been following AAT practice.
Anyway, an important thing to note is that not all node labels indicate
a characteristic of division. Some of them just name a facet, e.g.
'<entities>' or '<agents>'.


2. "The 'characteristic of division' seems quite important here, maybe
'function', 'form' or whatever could somehow be stated more explicitly,
perhaps as a reference to a skos:Concept with the label 'function' or
'form'"
Not sure where this is leading. A few characteristics of division are
very common, but plenty others are unusual, sometimes unique, as in
'<engines by fuel type>' or '<schools by religious denomination>'. The
thesaurus editor simply devises a helpful way of dividing up a
collection of items according to the nature of those items. So I would
not see it as very practical to prepare an exhaustive list of
characteristics of division (except for an existing thesaurus, where you
could list all those that happened to appear in it, and the list could
turn out very long.)

Cheers
Stella

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Stella Dextre Clarke
Information Consultant
Luke House, West Hendred, Wantage, Oxon, OX12 8RR, UK
Tel: 01235-833-298
Fax: 01235-863-298
SDClarke@LukeHouse.demon.co.uk
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-----Original Message-----
From: public-esw-thes-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-esw-thes-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Danny Ayers
Sent: 20 August 2004 18:53
To: Miles, AJ (Alistair)
Cc: public-esw-thes@w3.org
Subject: Re: [Proposal][SKOS-Core] New vocab for arrays of concepts



> This one of the strongest requirements as yet not supported by SKOS 
> Core, so I thought I'd try to move this along by making a concrete 
> proposal.  This proposal seems very vocab heavy (i.e. lots of new 
> constructs) so feel free to shoot this down, or come back with some 
> better names for the suggested constructs.

One or two first impressions, please take lightly. 

The use of a collection rather than a container seems a good idea, if
for no better reason than the containers can confuse by sounding like
membership entails more than it does. But I think there is a better
reason, that it should be straightforward to interface with this kind of
construct programmatically for systems without much RDF/OWL support
- e.g. mapping to Java Collections - Sets/Lists (clarification over
whether duplicate items can appear might be an idea - I presume not, as
there is by definition a division between individual items).

Most of the constructs aren't really tied to Concepts, it might be worth
considering breaking these out into another namespace as a utility
vocabulary, perhaps having  skos:inCollection and skos:viewUnder as
specializations of properties with a more general domain/range. I'm not
sure - might the collections be useful elsewhere in SKOS, say for
expressing lists of  top concepts?

Another thing caught my eye, but I don't know if it would be significant
to anyone that actually knows something about thesauri ;-) The label of
the collection in your example: "Aircraft by function" (a node label or
guide term, the Wiki tells me). The 'characteristic of division' seems
quite important here, maybe 'function', 'form' or whatever could somehow
be stated more explicitly, perhaps as a reference to a skos:Concept with
the label 'function' or 'form'.

Cheers,
Danny.

Received on Saturday, 21 August 2004 09:56:51 UTC