RE: Concept Schemes hierarchies

Hi Juan,

 

ISO 25964 part 1 uses the Concept Group as a general abstraction.

One of the possible concept-group types is micro-thesaurus.

Other groups used in Unesco and Eurovoc are e.g. Domain.

On http://www.niso.org/schemas/iso25964/#schema a document [1] may be found about how to map/align
an ISO-25964 Thesaurus with SKOS.

 

The DC isPartOf [2] specifies a relationship among resources and indicates 

- this is a relationship between resources implying physical or logical inclusion

- “This term is intended to be used with non-literal values as defined in the DCMI Abstract Model
(http://dublincore.org/documents/abstract-model/). 

   As of December 2007, the DCMI Usage Board is seeking a way to express this intention with a
formal range declaration.”

 

In my practice, I limit the use dc:isPartof for relationships among content resources.

I.e. I do not use it to model the semantic relationships among other domain specific artifacts (such
as SKOS concept scheme and SKOS Concept or Thesaurus, Terms/Labels and Concepts).

 

The usage of micro-thesaurus and hence semantics of micro-thesaurus are not standardized yet (as far
as I know).

 

The specified correspondence proposal [1]

- maps ISO 25964 Concept Group to iso-thes:ConceptGroup a sub-class of skos:Collection.

- requires the use of skos:inScheme (or sub-properties depending the ConceptGroup type) on instances
of iso-thes:ConceptGroup

- proposes the use of sub-classes of iso-thes:ConceptGroups when a clear semantic meaning can be
defined (in a business specific or standardized semantic domain)

- the hierarchy among concept groups is declared using iso-thes:superGroup and its inverse
iso-thes:subGroup

 

Note that SKOS defines skos:ConceptScheme and skos:Collection to be disjoint and the range of
skos:inScheme is a skos:ConceptScheme

 

To answer your first question:

- skos:inScheme cannot be used for the concept-scheme hierarchy because iso-thes:ConceptGroup, being
a sub-class of skos:Collection cannot be a skos:ConceptScheme.

  so e.g. a micro-thesaurus <mt> which is a sub of a domain <d> which is in thesaurus <t> would make
the domain in the same time a skos:Collection and a skos:ConceptScheme.

  the superGroup/subGroup relationships are the advised iso-thes SKOS extention properties.

To answer your second question:

- the iso-thes superGroup (and its inverse subGroup) need(s) to be transitive

 

A Note on EUROVOC:

The EUROVOC specification predates ISO 25964-1.

eu:MicroThesaurus (and eu:Domain) classes are defined with the specific objectives.

The EUROVOC eu:MicroThesaurus allows to publish and validate those specific parts of EUROVOC as a
thesaurus on their own.

The model acknowledges that these [Micro-Thesaurus] parts are managed within the larger unique
EUROVOC thesaurus. 

In this modeling the eu:MicroThesaurus is NOT a sub-class of iso-thes:ConceptGroup (though there is
a trivial association possible).

 

[1] http://www.niso.org/schemas/iso25964/correspondencesSKOS/

[2] http://dublincore.org/documents/2012/06/14/dcmi-terms/?v=terms#isPartOf
<http://dublincore.org/documents/2012/06/14/dcmi-terms/?v=terms%23isPartOf> 

 

 

Kind Regards and Best whishes,

 

Johan De Smedt 

Chief Technology Officer

 

mail:  <mailto:johan.de-smedt@tenforce.com> johan.de-smedt@tenforce.com

mobile: +32 477 475934

mail-TenForce

 

From: pastorcito@gmail.com [mailto:pastorcito@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Juan Antonio Pastor Sánchez
Sent: Sunday, 30 December, 2012 09:50
To: public-esw-thes@w3.org
Subject: Concept Schemes hierarchies

 

Hello everyone,

Recurrently some messages in this list concerning the implementation with SKOS of thesauri formed by
several microthesauri Thesauri [1]

Some KOS as EUROVOC define specific properties to represent this. The use of properties such as
dc:isPartOf or developing artifacts is another approaches.

Considering only skos:inScheme: is it possible to use this property to define hierarchies of concept
schemes?

Example: two concept schemes and <S1> and <S11>, <S1> represents the whole thesaurus and <S11> a
microthesaurus. It could be defined:

<S11> skos:inScheme <S1>

Certainly this is consistent with the definition of skos:inScheme in [2] and [3].

In this case, could be usefull define skos:inSheme as transitive (skos:inScheme rdf:type
owl:Transitive Property). Thus, having a <C1> concept and the declaration:

<C1> skos: inScheme <S11>

could be inferred that:

<C1> skos: inScheme <S1>

Best regards,
Juan


[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw-thes/2010Jun/0010.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/#L1101
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/#L2805


-- 
Juan Antonio Pastor Sánchez, Ph.D. 
Dep. of Information and Documentation
Faculty of Communication and Documentation
University of Murcia
phone: +34 868 88 7252
http://webs.um.es/pastor
pastor@um.es