SKOS Labelling Properties

It has come to our attention that there is an inconsistency between  
the SKOS Reference and the SKOS Primer. In Section 2.2 of the primer,  
we have:

[[
As specified in Section 5 of the SKOS Reference, the properties  
skos:prefLabel, skos:altLabel and skos:hiddenLabel provide simple  
labels. They are all sub-properties of rdfs:label.
]]

This is *not* the case in Reference. The labelling properties are  
*not* declared to be sub-properties of rdfs:label in either the  
Reference prose or the RDF schema. I believe that this is an  
oversight, and that expectations are that the SKOS lexical labelling  
properties should be subproperties of rdfs:label in order to ensure  
compatability with existing tools (e.g. see [1]). The inclusion of  
the statement in the Primer lends weight to this.

I propose that the SKOS Reference (and accompanying schema) includes  
the assertion that the SKOS lexical labelling properties are  
subproperties of rdfs:label. This violates OWL-DL constraints, but  
this is already the case for the SKOS RDF schema.

This requires a change to the SKOS Reference as recently reviewed. I  
would like to ask the document reviewers to explicitly state whether  
they grant their consent to this change, and invite other WG  
participants to comment.

	Sean

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw-thes/2008Jul/ 
0023.html

--
Sean Bechhofer
School of Computer Science
University of Manchester
sean.bechhofer@manchester.ac.uk
http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/people/bechhofer

Received on Friday, 22 August 2008 11:09:49 UTC