RE: How to use notations from classification schemes in SKOS

Hello all,

Some remarks about Alistair's mail. Some of them I am not sure, expert
advice is welcome.

> I don't think it makes sense to divide thesauri from classification
> schemes, because the underlying mathematical and computational models
> describing retrieval systems that use them are extremely similar and
can
> easily be generalised.
> 

The problem is that if you include a skos:notation that just deals with
classification schemes you make a de facto difference between them. 
[Of cours this remark is irrevelant if notations are as often
encountered in thesauri than in classifications, but I am not sure it
will be the case ;-) ]

> Regarding use of skos:prefLabel, the original intention was to use
this
> property only to give lexical labels that are in fact words or
> collocations of words from some natural language. I.e. skos:prefLabel
> should always be used with a literal that has a language tag. 

Which prevent in any case a possible skos:notation to be a subproperty
of skos:prefLabel I guess. That solves one of our modelling problems if
you want skos:notation in SKOS...

>Therefore
> I would suggest that, for classification schemes, captions be given
via
> the skos:prefLabel property, even where two concepts in the same
scheme
> have the same caption (see the note on integrity constraints below). 

See my horrified scream below ;-)

> Note that some thesauri use both notations and preferred terms (see
e.g.
> BS8723-2).

Very interesting, that can bring an additional argument against having
skos:notation as subproperty of skos:prefLabel. Btw can you point at
these examples? 

> In the draft 'SKOS Core Integrity Testing and Quality Assurance for
> Instance Data' [1] I structured the tests in a very deliberate way ...
> [...]
> This design is intended to handle the situation where some types of
> 'concept scheme' legitimately allow two 'concepts' to have the same
> preferred label, whereas other types of 'concept scheme' don't allow
this.

Here is the scream I guess ;-). Do you have also example of such
vocabularies? The standards usually say that concept scheme entities are
to be referred by a *single* pref label.
This view is furthermore contradictory with the SKOS information that
states that 'No two concepts in the same concept scheme may have the
same value for skos:prefLabel in a given language'
So what is the 'official' SKOS position on this quite important point?

Cheers,

Antoine