- From: Alistair Miles <alistair.miles@zoo.ox.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 14 May 2008 17:34:24 +0100
- To: <public-esw-thes@w3.org>
- Cc: "'SWD WG'" <public-swd-wg@w3.org>
Hi all, The current SKOS Reference Working Draft [1] takes the following position. The property skos:broader is, by convention, used to assert a "direct" hierarchical link between two concepts. The property skos:broaderTransitive is used to infer the transitive closure of hierarchical links, i.e. all "direct" and "indirect" hierarchical links between concepts. A software application can use skos:broader to query for direct hierarchical links, and can use skos:broaderTransitive to query for all (direct and indirect) hierarchical links. This is a pragmatic position, supporting software applications that need to access both direct and indirect hierarchical links. Note that many thesaurus software applications have this need, regardless of your philosophical position on whether the thesaurus hierarchical relationship is transitive or not. Cheers, Alistair. [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-skos-reference-20080125/ -- Alistair Miles Senior Computing Officer Image Bioinformatics Research Group Department of Zoology The Tinbergen Building University of Oxford South Parks Road Oxford OX1 3PS United Kingdom Web: http://purl.org/net/aliman Email: alistair.miles@zoo.ox.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)1865 281993
Received on Wednesday, 14 May 2008 16:35:09 UTC