Re: Concepts represented by symbols

I think that the symbols are effectively preferredTerms in a particular
person's vocabulary - it's just that they use what we think of as pictures
instead of the glyphs that represent "normal" fonts.

So the question is more the range of the "term" properties and whether they
are fixed sa text or can be resources.

It might be interesting to make a subproperty of preferredLabel and altLabel
that is also a subProperty of foaf:depicts, and suggest the use of that
specifically for symbols, but it might be overkill - it still depends on
having an appropriate range to start with.

I certainly think it is more important that the symbols are represented as
first class terms in SKOS than that they are linked to other vocaublaries
such as FOAF, although I think that is a vry positive step. (Providing ways
of linking to Dublin Core subject vocabularies is more along the lines of
using foaf:depicts - very helpful but not the core problem).

There are similar possibilities in VoiceXML, where there are a handful of
options available in an interaction designed to be through voice, and
developers will define assorted ways of recogninsing from a user's speech
which of the relevant concepts is being matched. (It is not real natural
language processing, but more pattern matching in situtations which are
tightly enough constrained that it looks like it...)

This all gets further complicated by the fact that Unicode are in the process
of encoding a set of these symbols (Bliss) which effectively means encoding a
number of these concepts as single characters which we expect to have
available in general...

cheers

Chaals



On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, Miles, AJ (Alistair)  wrote:

>
>*Chaals:
>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...
>
>I had thought about using the foaf:depiction property to allow an image
>representation of a concept.  However, reading up on the WWAAC project
>suggests to me that foaf:depiction may not be enough, and in fact we would
>need something like skos:prefSymbol and skos:altSymbol (which could be
>sub-props of foaf:depiction??).  Chaals what do you reckon?
>
>Al.
>

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Received on Wednesday, 25 February 2004 05:19:17 UTC