Re: AW: [Dbpedia-discussion] Using DBpedia resources as skos:Concepts?

Hi

Neubert Joachim wrote:
> In my eyes, it's completely ok to use skos:exactMatch or skos:closeMatch 
> in a situation like this (I did it myself for the STW Thesaurus for 
> Economics mapping to dbpedia).
>  
> Thesauri and classifications are not restricted to abstract concepts. 
> Some thesauri deal explicitly with individual things, e.g. the widely 
> used Getty "Thesaurus of Geographic Names" or "Union List of Artist 
> Names". Other thesauri (like STW) have sections (or facets, as Leonard 
> put it) on geografic names along with others containing "pure" concepts. 
> SKOS, as I understand it, is intended to cover all this and to be used 
> beyond strict class hierarchies or class/individual dichotomies.

While I agree that using real-world entities for classification is ok I don't think this means you have to declare them to be (skos:)concepts. The "has subject" relationship in FRBR [1] for example can link a work to a concept but also to places, people, events, other works, etc. So in this case you can use real-world entities to classify the work (to state what its subjects are) but that doesn't mean you declare all those entities to be conceptual.

So in my eyes there's still value in keeping (skos:)concepts and other things apart. Concepts to me are closer to classes than to individuals. And as Dan pointed out concepts have administrative data attached - they get created and changed etc. so they're basically units of organisation.

I'd therefore prefer using the UMBEL terms or something else for aligning real-world entities and concepts.

> By the way, some of the SKOS properties (especially the 
> prefLabel/altLabel/hiddenLabel semantics) can be useful in a broad range 
> of applications. Eg. dbpedia itself could be used as a great source for 
> synonym candidates by mapping the resources to skos:Concept and the 
> labels for dbpedia:redirect resources to skos:altLabel.

Yup, it has a lot of useful annotation terms. They are all declared to be annotation properties and deliberately don't have skos:Concept in their domain. So you can use them on anything which is great!

Regards,
  Simon


[1] http://archive.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr_current5.htm#5.2 - scroll down to "5.2.3 Subject Relationships"

Received on Thursday, 5 November 2009 16:36:02 UTC