Re: Doubts about domains and microthesauri in Thesaurus to SKOS conversion

On 2010-02-18 15:11, Giacomo Bartoloni wrote:
> Hi everybody, I'm studying the best way (or the most beautiful and
> meaningful form) to represent a thesaurus with domains and
> microthesauri, in my case Eurovoc and few ones, in "SKOS 2009" format.
> My doubt is how to deal with domains and microthesauri, I found many
> examples (UKAT's, IVOA vocabularies and STW's) but it seems to lack a
> shared method to do it.
> In UKAT thesaurus both the thesaurus and the microthesauri are
> skos:ConceptScheme and the concepts have the property skos:inScheme
> pointing to the main scheme and to the related microthesaurus.
> According to IVOA all the domains and the microthesauri are
> skos:Concept but I think that in this way I loose the base thesaurus
> Descriptor goal and I put all domains, microthesauri and descriptors
> on the same level.
> In the STW's thesaurus, there is only one skos:ConceptScheme, the
> thesaurus itself, and the domains, the microthesauri and the
> descriptors are mapped into skos:Concept but this class is extended
> into stw:Descriptor and ztw:Thsys.
>
> Which is the best thesaurus representation?
>
> Thanks a lot
>
> Giacomo Bartoloni
>    
You might be interested to see the draft ISO 25963-1 data model, which I 
attach. This contains some elements that are not (yet) implemented in 
SKOS, such as ThesaurusArray and ConceptGroup.

Arrays are sets of sibling terms, often grouped or ordered by some 
"characteristic of division" specified in a "NodeLable", whereas 
ConceptGroups are collections of concepts which may not be 
hierarchically related to each other, but may be subsets of the whole 
thesaurus, such as microthesauri or domains.

These are described in more detail in the draft standard, which is 
available for comment until 28th February 2010 on the British Standards 
Institution web site at <http://drafts.bsigroup.com/> (Free registration 
required). Have a look at paragraphs 15.2.17 and 15.2.18.

I hope that someone will come up with a way of incorporating these and 
other parts of the ISO model into SKOS as extensions or additions if 
necessary. I haven't yet worked out whether the The EUROVOC Thesaurus 
Ontology Schema that Johan de Smedt sent is consistent with the ISO 
model, but would be glad so see any comments.

Leonard Will

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