Re: FW: [Proposal][SKOS-Core] skos:denotes

In message <415D70C5.3000806@hplb.hpl.hp.com> on Fri, 1 Oct 2004, Dave 
Reynolds <der@hplb.hpl.hp.com> wrote
>Longer: "We can think of a SKOS concept as standing for the set of 
>resources which can be classified under that concept. For example, in a 
>thesaurus of computer science topics used for document classification 
>one might have a 'Distributed systems' concept which stands for all the 
>papers which can be classified under 'Distributed systems'. When the 
>things being classified are represented by RDF resources then it is 
>useful to have a property which can link the resource to the SKOS 
>Concept(s) under which it is classified - skos:classifiedAs is such a 
>property though applications are free to define more specific sub-properties."

If I may again translate this into thesaurus-speak, to clarify it in my 
mind, we would say that "resources" (or "documents") do not form part of 
a thesaurus.

When a thesaurus is used to index a collection of documents, we 
associate one or more thesaurus terms with each document, showing that 
that document has some relevance to the concepts which the terms 
represent. This creates a catalogue. I'd prefer to avoid the expression 
"classified under", because classification is a rather different 
operation than the assignment of index terms for retrieval purposes.

A thesaurus may have concepts which are "classes of one", often 
represented by proper names, but these are still concepts, not 
resources.

>As to semantics I'm not sure. You could define its semantics to include 
>inheritance of classification:
>
>  if (r skos:classifiedAs s) holds and (s skos:broader sb) then
>          (r skos:classifedAs sb) holds

If the thesaurus is properly constructed then this should be true, but 
it is implicit rather than explicit when assigning indexing terms to 
resources.

Leonard

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Received on Friday, 1 October 2004 15:47:27 UTC