Re: Quick Guide to Publishing a Thesaurus on the Semantic Web

Hi Alistair, all,

I agree with your additions to the text.

> Conversion is a tricky subject, because as the discussion went before it isn't a matter of simply saving in SKOS format - a commitment must be made to the good use of URIs etc.  Also the specifics of generating and maintaining a SKOS/RDF representation of a thesaurus vary wildly depending on the technologies in place in the organisation, which makes a general sort of note difficult to write.  So I left this for the moment ... maybe we can discuss whether to try covering conversion in another note?

- Sorry to be nagging about it, but I think the outcome of the 
discussion was (as you already state) that conversion is indeed tricky, 
that conversion is more than XML > save as: SKOS. However, the poit is 
that  many people do not realize this. And this is exactly the reason 
why the quick guide would be a good place to help people out of this 
dream (i.e. early on). I agree it's hard to write a general note, but 
maybe what we can do is pointing out an example source (XML), example 
transformation tech (XSLT) with the explicit statement that more issues 
play a role than we have room for here to explain? You actually already 
half explain a conversion by the UKAT example (from a text file to 
RDF/XML), so it fits well with the current text to explain that each 
UKAT "Term: ..." in the source file needs to be translated to a new 
"<skoks:Concept ..." node (with a URI, which you may have to introduce 
yourself).


- "such as it's title, description" (change to "its")


> I wanted to leave the skos:inScheme statement in, because I think it's quite important.  But I changed the text above the RDF/XML box to:

- Is it then not better to also include text to explain why it's in 
there, instead of only including it in the syntax?


> Left that, because 'facet' is difficult due to overloaded usage.

- Didn't know it was overloaded, good to know. Why this is the case, can 
you give some details?

With regards,
Mark.

-- 
  Mark F.J. van Assem - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
        mark@cs.vu.nl - http://www.cs.vu.nl/~mark

Received on Thursday, 31 March 2005 17:20:43 UTC