Re: thesaurus interchange language

Hi Stella,

I didn't know about DD8723-5 format.  It does seem to cover most of the 
requirements of a thesaurus interchange language.  Am I right in 
thinking that you are involved in its revision process 
(http://www2.db.dk/nkos-workshop/pp%20presentationer/NKOS-Stella.pdf)?

If so, I'd be interested in hearing what you see as the relevant 
strengths and weaknesses of DD8723-5 and SKOS, and more importantly why 
you think it's better to create two separate dialects rather than 
standardising on one...

 From my perspective the beauty of SKOS is that it's flexible and 
extensible enough to allow a huge variety of uses.  A thesaurus just 
happens to be a really important use case because if SKOS becomes a 
lingua franca for thesauri (and particularly *big* thesauri like MDA, 
AAT, LCSH), then the SKOS standard will instantly get huge mindshare 
among Information Managers and Librarians.

Cheers,

-- Stephen.

Stella Dextre Clarke wrote:
> Stephen Bounds wrote:
>>
>> But to me, the argument is about the primary use case of SKOS.  If 
>> SKOS is first and foremost designed as a thesaurus interchange 
>> language, then it's essential that <skos:broader> be non-transitive 
>> (see the polyhierarchy example I gave to Simon for an illustration of 
>> why).
> 
> I believe the purpose of SKOS is first and foremost to enable publishing 
> a simple KOS on the Web, motivated especially by the desire to serve the 
> Semantic Web. If you want a format for exchanging thesauri, what about 
> the DD8723-5 format (aka BS8723 format) which you can see at 
> http://schemas.bs8723.org/ ? Its data model is not so very different 
> from that of SKOS.
> Stella
> 
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> Stella Dextre Clarke
> Information Consultant
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Received on Friday, 1 August 2008 12:54:44 UTC