ISSUE-178: Last Call Comment: PFWG: Semantic Relations

ISSUE-178: Last Call Comment: PFWG: Semantic Relations

http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/178

Raised by: Alistair Miles
On product: SKOS

Raised by Al Gilman on behalf of PFWG in [1]:

"""
Re: Section 8: Semantic Relations

We understand that SKOS has been devised to be universally applicable  
to various types of knowledge organization systems, many of which do  
not have semantically clear-cut relations, but are rather inaccurate  
in their meaning.  However, there are use cases that would benefit  
from a stricter and richer definition of vocabulary for concept schemes.

For example, the properties for hierarchical relationship  
(skos:broader, skos:narrower) are specified to indicate that ‘one  
[concept] is in some way more general ("broader") than the other  
("narrower")’.  The primer [2] even mentions the subjectivity of  
these properties: “skos:broader and skos:narrower enable the  
representation of hierarchical links, such as the relationship  
between one genre and its more specific species , or, depending on  
interpretations, the relationship between one whole and its parts.”   
Obviously, one can create custom-defined subproperties, but  
interoperability is much harder to achieve with custom-defined  
subproperties than with pre-defined properties that are part of the  
SKOS core.

At a minimum, it would be helpful to have separate pairs of SKOS core  
properties defined for inheritance relationships (superclass- 
subclass) vs. structural relationships (whole-part).  These would be  
subproperties of skos:broader and skos:narrower.  So the user would  
have the choice between the (inaccurate) super-properties or the  
(semantically clearer) subproperties.
"""

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2008Oct/0063.html

Received on Wednesday, 8 October 2008 09:52:55 UTC