RE: [Proposal][SKOS-Core] skos:denotes

Sorry, but I am completely lost in this conversation. Seems to me what
this bloke Alistair J Miles is really looking for is a sort of "Beam me
up Scotty" over the Internet. (Any minute now he'll pop right out of my
monitor.) I'm not just making a joke of it. I think I am saying you are
asking for the moon, and any approximation to the moon could prove
unsatisfactory.

???
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 Dan Brickley
Sent: 29 September 2004 17:24
To: Dave Reynolds
Cc: Miles, AJ (Alistair) ; 'public-esw-thes@w3.org'
Subject: Re: [Proposal][SKOS-Core] skos:denotes



* Dave Reynolds <der@hplb.hpl.hp.com> [2004-09-29 16:56+0100]
> Dan Brickley wrote:
> 
> >SKOS is one layer of abstraction further removed from reality than
> >basic RDF,
> 
> I guess I've seen it as another modeling style in parallel to
> Class/Instance modeling rather than a layer more abstract.

In general, thesaurus-style and class/instance-style are at the same
level. But SKOS-in-RDF is an encoding of the former using the machinery
of the latter, which I guess is why it feels like a layering situation
to me.

> >If several parties use SKOS and they have a concept in their 
> >SKOS-expressed thesauri that stand for the person Alistair Miles, 
> >while other parties simply write RDF statements about Alistair 
> >directly, we'd imho benefit if we had some conventions for figuring 
> >out that they were talking about the same thing. But they're not "the

> >same thing" in the conventional RDF/OWL sense, since the class Person

> >and the class skos:Concept are presumably disjoint.
> 
> Ah I hadn't realize they were expected to be disjoint. I nearly wrote
> earlier that it you could simply have the bNode Al-as-foaf-Person also
be 
> an instance of skos:Concept. Then it could, for example, be directly 
> attached to a thesaurus without this extra level of indirection and
use 
> owl:sameAs to indicate these correspondences.

I think Alistair explored this at some point. Maybe it could be made to
work, though I fear things could get into a tangle, since the kinds of
metadata we like to have about people, and about thesaurus concepts, are
quite varied. Also, it would fold together concepts from different SKOS
thesauri that happened to denote/conceptualise/represent the same
things. So if we had workflow metadata like 'concept_creation_date', or
anything really, attached to indivdual concept nodes, we'd risk mangling
our data when things got merged.

In other words, we probably (imho) don't want to say that Alistair the
person is the selfsame thing as the representation of Alistair in the
SKOS from my weblog categories, and also as the representation of
Alistair in the SWED SKOS thesaurus (if he appeared there). It feels
more intuitive to model them as three distinct entities (which have 
different creators, for eg :), and take about
their inter-relationships. The SKOS mapping work allows us to do this
when talking about his appearance in several SKOS datasets; the new 
property would bridge this to the rest of the RDF world.

Am I making any more sense yet?

Dan

> 
> >Maybe skos:represents would work better as a name?
> 
> Yes, possibly.
> 
> Dave

Received on Wednesday, 29 September 2004 17:20:09 UTC