RE: [WNET, PORT, OEP] Synset's and Classes - dumb question

Alistair

> The skos:Concept class [1] is there to type something that has a unique
> intended meaning, but is not necessarily a class or an individual.  Do you
> think it is appropriate to map synsets onto skos:Concepts?

I get more and more the feeling that skos:Concept is more generic, IOW less specified than
more specific (hem) types of "concepts" used in various KOS. skos:Concept does not presume
any specific use of its instances in a specific KOS. The concept of dog can be used to
define a linguistic set of synomyms, a class, a taxonomy category à la Yahoo ... and all
of those uses are more specified than the generic one, which could be a common reference
to those various types of uses.

> Dan Brickley and I were discussing this sort of thing recently.  We wanted
> to be able to express the relationship between for example the concept that
> I label with the word 'dog', and the class of dogs.  There are some
> philosophical and (far more tractable) practical issues that arise if you
> alow these two nodes to be merged (i.e. if you use owl:sameAs).

One issue being why you needed both "Class" and "Concept" to begin with, to merge them
afterwards ;-)

> We arrived
> at a tentative suggestion to introduce a predicate into the SKOS vocab,
> called skos:conceptualises (or something along the same lines).  So e.g.
>
> [	a	skos:Concept;
> 	skos:prefLabel	'dogs';
> 	skos:altLabel	'mutts';]
> skos:conceptualises
> [	a	owl:Class;
> 	rdfs:label		'The class of all dogs';]

Well, thinking about it along the lines of the concept being more generic, and the class a
specific use of the concept, I would tend to put it the other way round, that is,
referring to the original unformal Concept in the definition of the formal Class. Maybe
use some "isDefinedBy" annotation here, not to invent something new, or, as suggested in
SWAD forum lately, "subjectIndicator".

[	a	owl:Class;
	rdfs:label		'Dog';]
skos:subjectIndicator
[	a	skos:Concept;
 	skos:prefLabel	'dogs';
	skos:altLabel	'mutts';]

The philosophical and practical bottom line of this : most concepts are emerging from the
general conversation first as sort of fuzzy linguistic-semantic attractors, gathering with
time names, synonyms, unformal descriptions, then more and more formal definition and
uses. Various levels of definition for a given concept are useful in some context and
should be kept, and it would not be a good idea to force all concepts into formal
definitions in any context. OTOH it is often interesting to track the genealogy of formal
concepts back to unformal ones.

Bernard

Bernard Vatant
Senior Consultant
Knowledge Engineering
Mondeca - www.mondeca.com
bernard.vatant@mondeca.com

Received on Wednesday, 5 May 2004 18:01:07 UTC