How to distinguish unique and non-unique prefLabels?

Hi,

Mapping a classification (not a thesaurus) to SKOS, I stumbled upon the 
problem of distinguishing unique and non-unique preferred labels. The 
concepts in our classification have

1. a unique notation (unique)

2. a main label (not unique, as it's no thesaurus)

3. an extendend main label (unique by adding a qualifier)

3. possibly alternative labels

Here is a simple example with the non-existing property
"skos:uniquePrefLabel" for the extended, unique label:

<15.00>
   skos:notation "15.80" ;
   skos:prefLabel "history"@en ;
   skos:narrower <15.87> .

<15.87>
   skos:notation "15.87" ;
   skos:prefLabel "USA"@en ;
   skos:uniquePrefLabel "History (USA)"@en ;
   skos:altLabel "United States"@en .

I am searching for a best practice to encode both types of preferred 
labels: the non-unique but short label, best used in combination with a 
notation and/or in a hierarchical view if the KOS is used as 
classification, and the artificial but unique label, best used if the 
KOS is used as thesaurus.

The best solution that I found so far, is creating

skos:nonUniquePrefLabel rdfs:subPropertyOf skos:prefLabel ;
   skos:scopeNote "a preferred label, that is not unique for some 
concept scheme" .

skos:uniquePrefLabel    rdfs:subPropertyOf skos:prefLabel ;
   skos:scopeNote "a preferred label, that is unique for some concept 
scheme" .

but I hesitate to create just another RDF property that nobody else 
uses. Any suggestions?

Jakob

P.S: The same can be applied to notations, but non-unique notations are 
probably less common than non-unique preferred labels.

-- 
Jakob Voß <jakob.voss@gbv.de>, skype: nichtich
Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / Common Library Network
Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
+49 (0)551 39-10242, http://www.gbv.de

Received on Wednesday, 12 January 2011 13:49:40 UTC