- From: Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:12:40 +0100
- To: Antoine Isaac <aisaac@few.vu.nl>
- Cc: Sean Bechhofer <sean.bechhofer@manchester.ac.uk>, Alistair Miles <alistair.miles@zoo.ox.ac.uk>, Guus Schreiber <schreiber@cs.vu.nl>, SWD WG <public-swd-wg@w3.org>, Alasdair Gray <agray@dcs.gla.ac.uk>
Antoine and Sean, hello. On 2008 Oct 14, at 10:20, Antoine Isaac wrote: >>> By the way cc Norman Gray, as this conflicts a bit with what I've >>> previously written to him >> >> It would be very useful to have Norman's comments on this. > > Well at the beginning he was using plain literals with notations, > but with the Reference as it is now worded I really did not have any > difficulties convincing him that he was wrong :-/ >> >> Sean I come at this, not as someone wanting to create a SKOS vocabulary, but as someone recommending how other people should. The Virtual Observatory community is working on a recommendation [1] for how vocabularies might be made interoperable, and that's recommending using SKOS. This document motivates this decision, gives specific advice on how to do this (effectively creating a SKOS profile, though we don't put it like that), and how to serve the vocabulary on the web (303s, and all that). We expect the readership of the document to be (people within) organisations which have a vocabulary they think could be usefully shared with the astronomy community, but who are not primarily interested in SKOS or the semantic web, and who will therefore probably not read the SKOS documents themselves (despite our exhortations to do that). We therefore hope to keep things as simple as possible. Our example vocabularies are therefore, for better or for worse, probably going to be rather influential within this community. One of the things on my list is to put together an 'astronomy vocabulary validator' on-line, to help folk check for conformance with our spec. With this hat on, I'm not hugely interested in the detailed semantics or processing of SKOS notations, but only concerned to do as much of The Right Thing as our readership will let us get away with. We originally had skos:notation illustrated without any typing. Antoine sent me some very useful comments on the document, to which I responded with [2], in which I supposed that <#concept123> skos:notation "1.2.3"^^<#notation> . <#notation> dc:description "The notation is defined in the document http://foo/bar.pdf " . would be a reasonable solution, apparently conformant with the letter of [3]. I don't think I want to make our recommendations any more complicated than that. If I start talking about XSchema datatypes in the 'notation', I think some of our readers may switch off, and simply not bother cutting-and-pasting that part of our templates. Best wishes, Norman [turning into a pragmatist in his old age -- where's the fire in that; where the wild staring eyes, and the zeal to Burn the Heretic...?] [1] http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/Vocabularies.html and 'editors' draft' snapshot at http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/ivoa/vocabularies/ [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2008Oct/0060.html [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/#notations -- Norman Gray : http://nxg.me.uk Dept Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester
Received on Tuesday, 14 October 2008 11:13:17 UTC