Re: SemWeb terminology page

On 3 Dec 2010, at 02:37, Thomas Baker wrote:

> Hi Jodi,
> 
> On Thu, Dec 02, 2010 at 10:13:47PM +0000, Jodi Schneider wrote:
>> The use of 'vocabulary' with different modifiers seems
>> doomed to fail. That's because, for me, I find it difficult
>> to mentally distinguish 'Value vocabulary' and 'element
>> vocabulary'. The idea of a 'library vocabulary' and 'semantic
>> web vocabulary' is just barely understandable enough for me
>> to handle.
> 
> I'm not sure I follow.  "Semantic Web vocabulary" I can
> understand, but is the use of "vocabulary" uniform enough
> in the library world for it to make sense to speak of a
> "library vocabulary"?

I don't suggest that we adopt these terms!

This is one of my own personal internal representations -- based on an idea of how the stereotypical librarian, and stereotypical semantic web person talk about vocabularies. (In fact, as you point out 'vocabulary' isn't a clearly defined technical term in librarianship -- before we even consider the overlap of these two communities).
Or rather, on the origins of the two groups of things that we're talking about.

> 
>> I'd be very, very happy if someone could propose an
>> alternative which didn't use 'vocabulary' twice. I fear
>> abbreviation as well as the assumption that, oh, yeah, we know
>> what vocabularies are (with different resultant assumptions
>> depending on one's background).
> 
> "Metadata element set" has been proposed as an equivalent
> to "element vocabulary".  I would argue, however, that
> speaking of "element vocabularies" and "value vocabularies"
> usefully underlines the fact that in the Linked Data context,
> the two types are comparable as Semantic Web (or RDF)
> "vocabularies".
> 
> I'm convinced that there are no terms we could come up with
> that would not evoke the wrong associations for _someone_.
> This is an exercise in coming up with terms that roughly evoke
> the right sorts of things for as many people as possible.
> Whatever terms we choose, we then have to define them clearly
> and concisely, up-front -- as in "when we say 'vocabulary',
> we mean...".

Defining our terms up front makes sense, of course!

Another approach to finding these terms -- since we've already had some discussion on list:

1) Documenting the lists that we're trying to distinguish (i.e. give a list of group A and group B, and explanation of what they are
2) Survey some librarians (not semweb sorts) -- what do you call group A? what do you call group B?
3) Survey some semweb-ians (not library sorts) -- what do you call group A? what do you call group B?

I think starting from the intersection of these groups (like we are) adds a challenge. I could definitely ask some semweb folks.

It also evokes one of the end-goals for creating these terms: communicating between these groups about something in the other domain.

-Jodi

> 
> But I hear your strong view on this and would be interested
> to know if others share the fear that using "vocabulary" in 
> this broader sense would simply prove to be too confusing to
> too many people.
> 
> Tom
> 
> -- 
> Tom Baker <tbaker@tbaker.de>

Received on Friday, 3 December 2010 09:37:54 UTC