RE: notes at concepts vs notes at terms

Hi Alistair

> Does anyone have some concrete examples of notes (of any type) attached to
> non-preferred terms in a thesaurus?  Could they post them to this list?

I currently works on two projects making heavy use of "annotated non-preferred terms".
Actually those vocabularies have not been defined as Thesauri to begin with, but are
nevertheless candidates to SKOSification. One is a technical multilingual glossary used by
a large building and civil engineering company to support technical documentation
translation tasks, and the other project includes entity recognition and expression in
references to legal publications and decisions. Both are designed to carry linguistic
information, which can be seen as orthogonal to semantic information, such as the
following.

In the first use case I need things like

- Gender (M/F), Number (S/P) , Nature (Noun / Adjective / Verb) of the alt lexical form.
Those informations can often be non-trivial for translators.

In the second use case I need to express

- The fact that the lexical form is

	- a lemma or a fixed form
	- case-sensitive or not
	- abbreviated or developed
	- canonical or variant form ...

- The scope of use of the lexical form, typically if the form is to be used for
recognition only, e.g. by text mining tools, or in generation/publication, and in either
case in which context(s) (official publications or press, paper publication or web
publication, index generation etc)

> If you absolutely must have notes describing an alternative label, we could
> allow something like e.g. ...
>
> ex:conceptA a skos:Concept;
>   skos:prefLabel 'Animals';
>   skos:altLabel 'Fauna';
>   skos:editorialNote [
>     skos:onLbl 'Fauna';
>     rdf:value 'Check with Mr.X. whether to keep "Fauna".';
>   ];

I would very much support something along those lines. Actually the above examples makes
me think about introducing a generic notion of "application note" including an
"application context", such as (taking from my own examples in legal publication).

ex:conceptA a skos:Concept;
  skos:prefLabel 'Cour d'assises';
  skos:altLabel 'C. ass.';
  skos:applicationNote [
     skos:onLbl 'C. ass.';
     skos:applicationContext 'Index Publication';
     rdf:value 'Use as Canonical Abbreviation';
  ];

This notion of application context captures the purpose of the note, and therefore avoid
multiplicity of skos:unameitNote. Editorial is a context, workflow is another,
translation, text mining, index publication are a few more ... and the list is open. The
above provides a generic mechanism for dealing with an open range of application contexts.

Cheers

Bernard

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Bernard Vatant
Mondeca Knowledge Engineering
bernard.vatant@mondeca.com
(+33) 0871 488 459

http://www.mondeca.com
http://universimmedia.blogspot.com
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Received on Thursday, 4 August 2005 13:37:59 UTC