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Trip report WWAAC - "thesauri" for symbol languages

From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2004 13:59:33 -0500 (EST)
To: thesaurus <public-esw-thes@w3.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.55.0402221343360.4800@homer.w3.org>

Hi folks,

On Friday I went to a workshop for the WWAAC project -
http://80.60.189.118/wwaac/project/index.asp

They are working on defining concepts and mapping those to symbols. These are
used by people who commnicate with a number of graphic symbols, and some
assitive technology, instead of writing. These people have a variety of
disabilities.

Their approach is to define a common set of concepts, and allow others to
extend them. For example, "bus" and "person" are common concepts which the
different tools enable, but "Charles McCathieNevile" or "the bus from my
house to school" isn't, although users might have a particular semi-private
symbol they use for this such as a photo of me, a special symbol or photo for
the particular bus.

They are using something similar to SKOS, and have been following the SKOS
work - I hope that they will send us some notes on what doesn't work for
their use cases out of what we provide (if anything), and be able to actually
work directly with SKOS. They use more stuff, but we should at least be able
to provide a basis for the things they are doing that are the same.

One thing that struck me is that I am not sure if we have set up for the idea
that a preferred term for a concept, in a particular vocabulary, might be
represented by an image or multimedia object rather than a text term...

Cheers

Chaals

Charles McCathieNevile  http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  tel: +61 409 134 136
SWAD-E http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe         fax(france): +33 4 92 38 78 22
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Received on Sunday, 22 February 2004 13:59:37 GMT

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