Re: Question about label and comments

Hi Cui,

Apologies for a delayed response.

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 09:53:33AM -0500, Tao, Cui, Ph.D. wrote:
> Hi, everyone,
> 
> I wonder if there is any rule about using skos:note and rdfs:comment?

No, it's up to you.

> For anything that is general enough (e.g, not example, or definition, or
> changeNote, etc), is there any restriction or drawback to use
> rdfs:comment? 

I think it depends on the main applications you anticipate consuming
your SKOS data. Most software I know of that makes any assumptions
about rdfs:comment expects to find a plain literal in the object
position. I'm not sure how existing SKOS software handles skos:note,
but if it follows the specs, it should handle any of the three
possible usage patterns [1].

> I think rdfs:label falls into the same situation. If there is only one
> label available for a class, should one use rdfs:label or
> skos:prefLabel?

Strictly speaking, skos:prefLabel is a sub-property of rdfs:label. So
if you add rdfs:label as well as skos:prefLabel, you are just adding
pre-computed inferences. So perfectly valid to do so. However, bear in
mind that skos:altLabel and skos:hiddenLabel are also sub-properties
of rdfs:label. So I would *not* write any code that expects rdfs:label
to behave like skos:prefLabel (i.e., only one per language).

> In addition,SKOS has changeNote and historyNote. We are not very clear
> about the difference between them. For example, if I want to stay that I
> added definitions to this ontology, should that be a changeNote, a
> historyNote, or even an editorialNote?

>From [2] ...

---
skos:historyNote describes significant changes to the meaning or the
form of a concept:

ex:childAbuse skos:historyNote 
    "estab. 1975; heading was: Cruelty to children [1952-1975]"@en.

In addition to these notes that are intended for users of a concept
scheme, SKOS includes two specializations of skos:note that are useful
for KOS managers or editors: skos:editorialNote and skos:changeNote.

skos:changeNote documents fine-grained changes to a concept, for the
purposes of administration and maintenance:

ex:tomato skos:changeNote 
  "Moved from under 'fruits' to under 'vegetables' by Horace Gray"@en.
---

...i.e., history notes are intended for the user of the thesaurus,
e.g., an indexer or searcher, to provide important historical
information that affects usage. Change notes are much more internal,
editorial tracking notes.

I think of changeNotes like the comments you'd enter on an SVN commit.

Hth

Alistair

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-primer/#secadvanceddocumentation
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-primer/#secdocumentation

-- 
Alistair Miles
Head of Epidemiological Informatics
Centre for Genomics and Global Health <http://cggh.org>
The Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics
Roosevelt Drive
Oxford
OX3 7BN
United Kingdom
Web: http://purl.org/net/aliman
Email: alimanfoo@gmail.com
Tel: +44 (0)1865 287669

Received on Tuesday, 6 July 2010 08:38:35 UTC