Re: [SKOS] The return of ISSUE-44 (was Re: TR : SKOS Reference Editor's Draft 23 December 2007)

On 9 Jan 2008, at 21:16, Antoine Isaac wrote:

>>
>> Yep, it's perfectly OK to be able to write false claims in SKOS.  
>> There's
>> nothing wrong with being wrong.
>>
>>                  The relationship is associative, and
>> > can be modeled in SKOS using the appropriate construct
>> > (skos:related).    The error is in the data, not the standard.
>>
>> +1
>>
>
> -1
> As far as I'm concerned, we are not trying to propose with SKOS a  
> standard that would oblige KOS owners to re-engineer their  
> conceptual structures to fit our whishes. The objective is to  
> easily represent and to publish KOSs. So if there is enough cases  
> of "non-transitive" hierarchies (and I do believe it is the case)  
> then it is a wrong design decision to make skos:broader transitive.

+1. So maybe I /would/ be unhappy seeing it as transitive....  Useful  
evidence here would be some concrete examples/use cases where the  
broader/narrower hierarchies aren't transitive. Do you have any Antoine?

> I would actually like to get some feedback on the following point  
> of view, to see whether I'm completely wrong or not. To me, ISO and  
> others are standards that are also intended as guidelines for  
> designing good thesauri, hence their spending much pages on  
> explaining how to properly choose a term and so on. SKOS is  
> different because:
> - it is not a guideline that says in details what makes a good KOS  
> or not for KOSs. We have some recommendations, but the number of  
> constraints is very small.
> - SKOS could be used to represent KOSs that are not thesauri

I think this is a very good point that Antoine makes here, and I'd  
strongly agree. We are providing a representational framework that  
can be used to represent (among other things) thesauri.

	Sean

--
Sean Bechhofer
School of Computer Science
University of Manchester
sean.bechhofer@manchester.ac.uk
http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/people/bechhofer

Received on Thursday, 10 January 2008 10:09:04 UTC