Re: some thoughts about ISSUE 35 ConceptSchemeContainment

I second this

At 12:59 PM 7/25/2007, Guus Schreiber wrote:

>Issue description: http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/36
>
>Synopsis of the issue: SKOS provides a mechanism to indicate that a 
>concept is contained in a concept scheme (the property 
>skos:inScheme), but it is nontrivial to define such containment for 
>relation between concepts (e.g. broader/narrower).
>
>The whole notion of containment in a thorny one in a Semantic Web 
>setting. Note that OWL ontologies do not have a language construct 
>for this. It is understandable that some way of saying that "these 
>elements are part of my vocabulary" is useful for vocabulary owners. 
>However, it is doubtful whether we can try to solve this at the 
>level of SKOS. The reasons for wanting to define containment 
>typically have to do with issues such as trust and rights. In my 
>view such mechanisms should be provided at the general RDF level. We 
>shouldn't try to solve this issue with a special-purpose construct in SKOS.
>
>I therefore propose to deprecate the property skos:inScheme.
>
>I suggest to include in our documents guidelines for how to handle 
>containment issues, e.g. by making using of rdf:isDefinedBy or by 
>relying on through guidelines for querying.
>
>I could also go one step further and propose to drop also the class 
>skos:ConceptScheme and the property skos:hasTopConcept. Instead of 
>skos:ConceptScheme SKOS users could just use the OWL construct 
>owl:Ontology, which also provides an import construct (owl:import). 
>Finding the top concepts could just be handled at the query level. 
>However, skos:ConceptScheme (and skos:hasTopCncept) could be just 
>viewed as a useful documentation vehicle.
>
>Guus

Received on Thursday, 26 July 2007 00:22:16 UTC