Re: [SKOS] relationships between labels

Hi all,

Just a quick note to add to the record that the fundamental difficulty with the 
"Term-as-Class" approach is agreeing on the semantics, and especially the identity 
conditions, for the members of the suggested new class.

In my experience, while some people may appear to hold superficially similar notions of 
what a "Term" is, when you try to express those notions formally you can arive at some 
interesting contradictions.

For example, in [1] Antoine essentially states that a "Term" cannot have more than one 
lexical value. However, others would disagree with this condition, and would consider e.g. 
"organisation" and "organization" to be "variant forms" of the same "Term" (this is the 
FAO/AGROVOC approach, see [2]). I don't mean to suggest that either is "correct", I just 
want to demonstrate that these two points of view are actually irreconcilable.

A related problem is, if two "Terms" have the same lexical value, are they therefore the 
same "Term"? Or can two "Terms" have the same lexical values, but still be different entities?

It's worth noting also that, in the DCMI community, "Term" can mean property or class or 
concept. i.e. nothing at all to do with lexical values.

A while ago I tried to write up a discussion of how different points of view on what a 
"Term" is lead to drastically different (and inconsistent) logical definitions - it's at 
[3], not very clear but the examples might help.

Cheers,

Al.


[1] 
http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/SkosDesign/RelationshipsBetweenLabels?action=recall&rev=6
[2] http://owl-workshop.man.ac.uk/acceptedPosition/submission_31.pdf
[3] http://isegserv.itd.rl.ac.uk/blogs/alistair/archives/25

Antoine Isaac wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I have written on 
> http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/SkosDesign/RelationshipsBetweenLabels 
> a first attempt regarding the action:
> 
>> [PENDING] ACTION: Antoine to capture the issue on capturing 
>> relationships between labels [recorded in 
>> [50]http://www.w3.org/2007/01/22-swd-minutes.html#action04]
> 
> 
> Perhaps the most important, concerning the action itself, is the 
> 'motivation' part that gives example of such links between labels.
> The 'solutions' part goes into discussion on ways to solve the issue, 
> inspired by the material found via [1]  and the page Alistair recently 
> wrote about Annotation Patterns [2].
> Any further attempt to go into a solution in terms of SKOS model shall 
> be worked out in cooperation with the issue on annotations on labels, I 
> think.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Antoine
> 
> [1] 
> http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core/proposals.html#thesaurusRepresentation-11 
> 
> [2] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/SkosDesign/AnnotationPatterns
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Alistair Miles
Research Associate
CCLRC - Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
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Web: http://purl.org/net/aliman
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Received on Tuesday, 20 February 2007 16:05:02 UTC