Issue : unicity of prefLabel per language per concept scheme

I've several current SKOS use cases making me wondering about this 
recommendation in
http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-swbp-skos-core-guide-20051102/#secmulti

"It is recommended that no two concepts in the same concept scheme be 
given the same preferred lexical label in any given language."

This recommendation follows the thesaurus standard practice, but other 
types of structured vocabularies which seem to be in the scope of SKOS 
don't follow this practice. I've in mind controlled vocabularies in law, 
where the same term is used in different contexts to label different 
concepts, the disambiguation being by context. The context itself is 
usually formally represented by a path to the concept in the 
broader-narrower tree, e.g., the following are four distinct concepts 
all using the term "Children custody" in different contexts, but in the 
same Concept Scheme "Divorce".

Contentious divorce: Temporary arrangements: Children custody
Contentious divorce: Definitive arrangements: Children custody
Non-contentious divorce: Temporary arrangements: Children custody
Non-contentious divorce: Definitive arrangements: Children custody

In such cases, encapsulating the context in the prefLabel string is 
rapidly cumbersome in interfaces, the context chain can become 
arbitrarily long in such matters.

How would one SKOS-ify such a vocabulary? If "Children custody" is used 
as prefLabel, the recommendation of unicity is obviously broken, if not, 
what should be the recommended value of prefLabel?

Bernard

-- 

*Bernard Vatant
*Knowledge Engineering
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Received on Monday, 3 December 2007 09:54:05 UTC