RE: Representing USE-OR in SKOS/XL/ISO25964

Thanks for the explaining the problem more detailed Osma.

In case you would use "pitch" as a mere altLabel for "pitch (sound)" and for
"pitch (steepness)" (solution 1), that may be sufficient.
This is compliant with alt labels (synonym) not needing to be unique.
- a type-ahead/autocomplete query could show:
   pitch [pitch (sound)]
   pitch [pitch (steepness)]
Likewise, the "USE OR" cases may be retrieved by grouping
concepts/prefLabel-s having the same alt-label.

I am not sure if a dedicated label class is needed to identify and exploit
such equivalence.
It may be an idea to flag the splitNonPreferredTerm indicating it is an OR
combination (and not the usual AND as intended in ISO 25964 8.5: compound
equivalence).

Regards,

Johan De Smedt

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Osma Suominen [mailto:osma.suominen@helsinki.fi]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2014 8:52 AM
> To: public-esw-thes@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Representing USE-OR in SKOS/XL/ISO25964
>
> Hi Johan!
>
> On 23/04/14 05:45, Johan De Smedt wrote:
> > The iso-thes depicts the compound equivalence relationship as detailed
> > in red below.
> >
> > This allows to infer the iso-thes:plusUseTerm and iso-thesUFTerm (USE+
> > and UF+ respectively).See blue arrows.
> >
> > The iso-thes ontology provided USE+ and UF+ are extensions of
> > skos-xl:labelRelation.
> >
> > Whereas the relationships (USE+ and UF+) exists among the terms (see
> > iso-thes:plusUseTerm and iso-thesUFTerm respectively), no direct
> > relation is inferred between the concepts ex:A (or ex:B) and the
> > SplitNonPreferredTerm.
>
> Thank you for the explanation and the picture.
>
> However, you are only describing the USE+/UF+ case, which is well
> covered by ISO25964-1 and the iso-thes SKOS extension. USE+ means
> something like "to represent term X that is not in the thesaurus, use a
> combination of A AND B". So to retrieve information about "coal mining",
> which is not included in some example thesaurus, you can use a Boolean
> query "coal AND mining" (example from ISO85964-1, sect. 8.5). (The UF+
> relationship is the exact inverse of USE+, I will skip it for brevity.)
>
> What I was asking for is the subtly different case USE-OR, where the
> given term ("pitch" in the example) is not in the thesaurus, and can be
> given multiple interpretations from which only one should be chosen by
> the indexer/retriever (or possibly both, using Boolean OR). To
> understand the difference, consider a database indexed using a thesaurus
> which includes the concepts "pitch (sound)" and "pitch (steepness)". If
> the standard USE+ relation were used to map "pitch" to these qualified
> terms/concepts, then "pitch" could be represented using a Boolean query
> "pitch (sound) AND pitch (steepness)". But such a query would likely
> yield few results or none at all, because the meanings of the two
> concepts are very different and not many database records will mention
> them both if they have been properly indexed.
>
> > So this does NOT cover the solution 2 and 3 statements making ex:pitch
> > (“pitch”) an alt label of ex:A and of ex:B.
>
> Sorry, I made a mistake in example 3 when I included altLabels (a
> copy-paste error). What I meant is this:
>
> --cut--
> 3. iso-thes SplitNonPreferredTerm with custom USE-OR property
>
> ISO 25964 has a class SplitNonPreferredTerm which can be used to
> represent "an 'imagined' concept that may exist in a user’s mind but is
> not present in the thesaurus". Though this class is normally used with
> the USE+ relation, one could coin a custom USE-OR property (below called
> ex:orUseTerm) and use it instead, like this:
>
> ex:A a skos:Concept ;
>    skosxl:prefLabel ex:pitch_sound .
>
> ex:B a skos:Concept ;
>    skosxl:prefLabel ex:pitch_steepness .
>
> ex:pitch_sound a skosxl:Label ;
>    skosxl:literalForm "pitch (sound)"@en .
>
> ex:pitch_steepness a skosxl:Label ;
>    skosxl:literalForm "pitch (steepness)"@en .
>
> ex:pitch a isothes:SplitNonPreferredTerm ;
>    skosxl:literalForm "pitch"@en ;
>    ex:orUseTerm ex:pitch_sound, ex:pitch_steepness .
> --cut--
>
> Note that I am not using isothes:plusUseTerm here, but a similar custom
> property ex:orUseTerm, because I want to express OR alternatives, not an
> AND combination.
>
> -Osma
>
> --
> Osma Suominen
> D.Sc. (Tech), Information Systems Specialist
> National Library of Finland
> P.O. Box 26 (Teollisuuskatu 23)
> 00014 HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO
> Tel. +358 50 3199529
> osma.suominen@helsinki.fi
> http://www.nationallibrary.fi

Received on Wednesday, 23 April 2014 07:49:50 UTC