[SKOS] help editing SKOS Primer and SKOS Semantics

Hi all,

At the telecon yesterday Guus asked me if I wanted any help editing the SKOS Primer and SKOS Semantics. Let me say, very enthusiastically, that I would love to have co-editors for either or both of these documents!

I think they will both be exciting and challenging documents to create, and for different reasons.

The SKOS Primer will have to be very approachable, written in a style which is easy to understand for a not-too-technical reader, with lots of examples and pictures. This is the document which "tells the story" to a wide audience. The challenge here is to present all of the features of SKOS in a really plain and simple way. The challenge is also to write prose which is easy for non-native English speakers to understand, and which is easy to translate into other languages. I've lost count of the number of different countries from which I've received emails about SKOS, and mostly from non-"Western" countries. We already have translations of SKOS labels and definitions in 6 languages.

The SKOS Semantics will have to be, as they say, a "water-tight" specification of the formal semantics of the SKOS vocabulary, and of any other normative aspects of SKOS. This is the foundation for all other specifications, and the basis for software implementations. The challenge here is to construct a simple, elegant and extensible normative specification, removing any ambiguity where it might cause a problem, but also allowing for flexibility and extensibility where that might be valuable or required. The RDF Semantics is, I think, a really good example of such a specification.

I look forward to working with you :)

Cheers,

Alistair.

--
Alistair Miles
Research Associate
Science and Technology Facilities Council
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Harwell Science and Innovation Campus
Didcot
Oxfordshire OX11 0QX
United Kingdom
Web: http://purl.org/net/aliman
Email: a.j.miles@rl.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1235 445440

Received on Wednesday, 3 October 2007 11:52:22 UTC