Re: SKOS transitive hierarchical relations

Hi Christian,


>
> Based on the discussions on this mailing list and the SKOS reference/model documentation, my understanding of the broader/narrower properties is that it is up to the application (processing a SKOS vocabulary) to interpret the hierarchical properties skos:broader and skos:narrower as transitive or not. Thus I can understand why "By convention, skos:broaderTransitive is not used to make assertions" (from the SKOS ontology).
> However, there are vocabularies published on the Web that relate their concepts using only skos:broaderTransitive (and not skos:broader).
> Although these are valid statements, I wonder if, for interoperability reasons, these vocabularies should additionally include skos:broader relations alongside with the already contained skos:broaderTransitive relations.
> This way, e.g., SPARQL queries involving SKOS vocabularies of different origin, might return a more complete result set if relying on the convention mentioned above and only query for skos:broader.
> Would it be, in your opinion, a useful feature for a thesaurus management software to detect concepts that are only related by skos:broaderTransitive and notify the user whether to automatically add the skos:broader relation?


In fact having thesauri published with only skos:broaderTransitive (and not skos:broader) is quite bad practice. Where have you seen this?

Indeed, the original idea is that the vocabulary providers would start publish assertions with skos:broader/narrower.
Then broader/narrowerTransitive statements could be infered, and materialized either by the thesaurus publisher or by a data consumer.
Note that there is no real interpretation freedom here. The transitive properties are defined as super-properties of the unspecified ones. This means that everytime you have a skos:broader statement between two concepts, the semantics of SKOS imply that there is a skos:broaderTransitive statement holding as well.
There is some more detail on this kind of inference at http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-primer/#sectransitivebroader.

I hope this helps,

Antoine

Received on Wednesday, 4 January 2012 14:21:48 UTC