Re: SemWeb terminology page

Hello Karen,

Would that definition of Svenonius be compatible with the view in [1]?
I have the feeling that yes: reference datasets in LD still control the terminology, even if in the LD case the importance of "terms" becomes secondary to the one of the resources that these terms refer to. But I'm really curious to hear from you (and others of course :-) ) on this.

Antoine

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lld/2010Dec/0029.html


> In her book "The intellectual foundation of information organization" Svenonius has a section on controlled and uncontrolled vocabularies. Her statement about controlled vocabularies says:
>
> "[Controlled vocabularies] are constructs in an artificial language; their purpose is to map users' vocabulary to a standardized vocabulary and to bring like information together." (p.88) [1]
>
> Do we agree that this is the role of our #1 group? I ask because I perceive this to be different from the original proposed definition:
>
> "These describe concepts that are used in actual metadata."
>
> If you look at FRAD [2] you see that the assignment of terminology to the concept is of equal or greater importance than any description of the concept itself. In fact, that's what I would emphasize as the role of a controlled vocabulary: that it is a method to *control* *language terms*. Many controlled vocabularies have minimal information about the concepts, but all exist to make a selection of particular terms of use.
>
> kc
>
> [1] http://openlibrary.org/works/OL475973W -- a basic foundation for how librarianship views KO.
> [2] http://www.ifla.org/publications/functional-requirements-for-authority-data
>
> Quoting "Young,Jeff (OR)" <jyoung@oclc.org>:
>
>>> > It would be odd to dismiss SKOS because we determined it was
>> designed
>>> to
>>> > manage "concepts" rather than "controlled vocabularies".
>>>
>>> I certainly wouldn't want to dismiss SKOS! The point is that
>>> SKOS organizes sets of lexical strings via underlying concepts.
>>
>> I would argue that "organizing" concepts or labels is getting into
>> optional features of SKOS. Your other comments indicate you would agree.
>> The essential features for authority control, in my view, are the
>> ability to identify something real (a skos:Concept), associate them in a
>> scheme (via skos:inScheme) and give them skos:pref/altLabels
>> (potentially "real" via skosxl:Label). Some forms of authority control
>> may want to use additional gravy from SKOS, but others could just as
>> well link out to other models via foaf:focus and organize from there.
>> Either or both ways, SKOS can act as a schematic naming network.
>>
>> Jeff
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>

Received on Saturday, 4 December 2010 11:29:59 UTC