Re: Supporting arrays of concepts

In message <000001c4372c$ab140080$0402a8c0@DELL> on Tue, 11 May 2004, 
Stella Dextre Clarke <sdclarke@lukehouse.demon.co.uk> wrote
>
>I agree with Andy's response. We have to be able to support ways of 
>working with the commonly used vocabularies. However, DDC and LCSH are 
>not thesauri. There are some fundamental differences in the assumptions 
>humans make when applying these things. It seems to me that SKOS was 
>developed with standard thesauri in mind, and may need some add-ons to 
>work across different types of vocabulary.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: public-esw-thes-request@w3.org
>On Behalf Of Houghton,Andrew
>Sent: 10 May 2004 21:13
>
>We are trying to encode AAT, LCSH, MeSH and DDC in SKOS. So my answer 
>to these questions is that SKOS needs to find a way to handle these 
>things.  There are a wealth of widely used vocabularies today and to 
>create a new Semantic Web data format that cannot take advantage of 
>these vocabularies seems, to me, to be problematic.
>
>Andy.

OK, I agree that it would be useful to have a mechanism for encoding 
pre-coordinate classification schemes and subject indexing strings, and 
I do like the idea of treating them in an integrated way that works 
smoothly with the encoding of thesaurus structures.  It will mean a 
significant expansion of the project, though. Is it currently within its 
scope?

The difficulty of applying this to existing schemes is that computer 
encoding requires the development and application of strict and 
consistent rules and algorithms, and accommodating existing schemes may 
require many messy exceptions and special provisions. As Andy says, 
though, these schemes are so widely used that we have to accommodate 
them.

My suggestion for dealing with the AAT "guide terms" was an attempt to 
interpret that thesaurus in a way that the SKOS encoding could 
accommodate, without distorting either.

Leonard

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Received on Tuesday, 11 May 2004 05:21:03 UTC