Re: Side question : mapping OWL classes to SKOS concepts Re: SKOS Guide and owl:sameAs

Hi Bernard,

> and still open issue, on which I'm currently dealing internally. How do 
> you map (a hierarchy of) classes in an RDFS/OWL ontology to (a hierarchy 
> of) SKOS concepts. The rationale of that is that you can model the same 

Yes, this is an additional type of mapping to those I mentioned:

- mapping rdfs/owl classes to instances of skos:Concept

> purposes. For example in a Tourism agency back-office ontology, I have a 
> "Hotel" class  with subclasses "OneStar" to "FiveStar",  but in the 
> end-user Web interface I have this simple hierarchy of (SKOS) concepts.
> 
> Accomodation
>    Cheap_Accomodation
>    Standard_Accomodation
>    Luxury_Accomodation
> 
> In the back office ontology, "Hotel du Parc" is an instance of the (OWL) 
> class "ThreeStar", with an attached description (document). In the 
> end-user interface, the description is indexed by the concept "Standard 
> Accomodation". I would like to express in a mapping that any instance of 
> "ThreeStar" in the back-office ontology will result in an indexation of 
> its description by the concept "Standard Accomodation" in the end-user 
> navigation. Waht is needed here is a one-way mapping from a OWL class 

This is a real conversion issue instead of a simple mapping issue, 
because you want to go from one way of viewing of the hotel-world (nr. 
of stars) to another (in terms of cheap/standard/luxury). You would 
also have this problem if the front-end was using an OWL ontology 
instead of a SKOS representation.

> hierarchy to a SKOS concept hierarchy. The SKOS concept hierarchy is 
> here a sort of "simplified view" of the OWL class hierarchy.

Yep. But it could also have been an OWL hierarchy that is a 
"simplified" view of the back-office OWL hierarhcy.

> Seems to me this will be a frequent use case if both OWL ontologies and 
> SKOS concept schemes are used in integrated environments. And there is 

Yes, but not necessarily for the use case you cite. Only if you have 
to work together with other SKOS thesauri do you have this problem.

> Since we need that right now for Mondeca applications, we are developing 
> our own vocabulary for it, but of course would be happy to see this 
> issue put on the standardisation track.

The problem probably is that you have to go from a class hierarchy 
(subClassOf between instances of rdfs/owl:Class) to an instance 
hierarchy (skos:broader/narrower between instances of skos:Concept). 
So what vocabulariy are you developing for it?

It sounds like an off-line conversion of the ontology to SKOS would 
solve the problem, removing the need for a mapping vocabulary.

Mark.

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

Received on Thursday, 2 November 2006 13:19:11 UTC