RE: SKOS Use Cases request for comments

We're all inundated with things to read about new protocols, standards,
workflows, and more.  Some of these things fit quite nicely into a
shared context and require very little background information to make
them meaningful.

SKOS defines a set of relations among terms, some of which are obvious
from their names, others of which are not.  Few are intuitively obvious
or are commonplace notions from the world we already have. What is a
ConceptualMappingLink? How is it related to a ConceptualRelation? What
does the R- prefix stand for? None are explained in the document, so
unless I've already read and am familiar with some undisclosed number of
existing specifications, I'm pretty much in the dark. [I do not discount
the possibility that those who don't already KNOW what these relations
are, won't have useful feedback, but I infer that you expect otherwise] 

Please understand I'm not saying what you have written is not useful...
it is just not stand-alone, and if the document is not stand alone, it
presents a two-stage difficulty:

1. Find out what the collection of documents is that is necessary to
achieve coherence
2. Read and understand them all, and integrate the understanding

The alternative is to not bother: heaven knows there are other things
competing for the same attention.

What then to do?

At the very least, the document should contain explicit links to the
requisite parts of the problem... the links are almost certainly there
already, but as a reader of the document, I don't know in advance what I
need to read and what I don't, and that uncertainty alone is a
disincentive to moving ahead.

Better still, add a section that summarizes the candidate functionality
relations, explain briefly how they fit into the overall framework, and
then proceed with the use case analysis.  I accept the possibility that
that could make the document unmanageably long.  There is some
compromise, I think, that would improve your likelihood of getting the
feedback you need.

Or maybe I'm a just a lazy sloth.  Or both, of course ;-)

stu




-----Original Message-----
From: Antoine Isaac [mailto:aisaac@few.vu.nl] 
Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2007 11:57 AM
To: Weibel,Stu
Cc: DC-GENERAL@JISCMAIL.AC.UK; public-swd-wg@w3.org
Subject: Re: SKOS Use Cases request for comments

Dear Stu,

Frist thank you for reading the document. Your comment is very useful.
Just one question however: were you just stuck in one specific section 
of the document (for instance the one on 'requirements') or did you 
generally stumble on SKOS features that you would have liked to be 
explained beforehand? And can you point at one or two specific examples 
where you were not satisfied? This might help us a lot to deal with your

comments.

Thanks,

Antoine
> I've downloaded this document and perused it.  It will not, on its
own, be understandable to those not already familiar with the SKOS
candidate functionality.
>
> I understand the desire to not replicate descriptions of these
candidate functionalities in this document, but without a direct and
obvious summary, the reader is left with the choice of diving into the
entire corpus of SKOS documents or just not bothering at all. If this
group really wants community feedback, I think there is further work to
be done to make these important ideas more accessible to the relevant
communities.
>
> stu
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: General DCMI discussion list [mailto:DC-GENERAL@JISCMAIL.AC.UK]
On Behalf Of Mikael Nilsson
> Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2007 5:06 AM
> To: DC-GENERAL@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: FYI: SKOS Use Cases request for comments
>
> Forwarded from the W3C:
>
>
>   
>> Request for Comments: SKOS Use Cases and Requirements: Working Draft
>>
>> 2007-05-16: The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has
>> published the First Public Working Draft of SKOS Use Cases and
>> Requirements [1]. Knowledge organization systems, such as taxonomies,
>> thesauri or subject heading lists, play a fundamental role in
information
>> structuring and access. These use cases and fundamental or secondary
>> requirements will be used to guide the design of SKOS (Simple
>> Knowledge Organisation System), a model for representing such
>> vocabularies. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity. We would
greatly
>> appreciate your comments and feedback on this Working Draft, which
should
>> be submitted to the SWD mailing list [2].
>>
>> [1]  http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-ucr/
>> [2]  mailto://public-swd-wg@w3.org
>>     
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 30 May 2007 17:10:08 UTC