Re: [SKOS] notations, label and their range (was Re: some thoughts about the OWL WG comments)

On 14 Oct 2008, at 10:20, Antoine Isaac wrote:

> Hi,
>>> I still don't get it: we say that skos:notation works with typed  
>>> literal, as in [1]
>>>
>>>> This property is used to assign a notation to a concept as a  
>>>> typed literal [RDF-CONCEPTS <http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/ 
>>>> #ref-RDF-CONCEPTS>].
>>>
>>> But in fact for the most common case (a concept having one  
>>> notation), skos:notation would be used with plain literals? I'm  
>>> really not convinced by what we are going to propose here...
>>
>> Antoine
>>
>> Are you not convinced because we haven't stated it clearly enough?  
>> Or not convinced by the notion that skos:notation might be used  
>> with a plain literal?
>
> I am not convinced because:
> First I am not aware this was ever stated, actually. To me until  
> Guus' mail, skos:notation was to be used only with typed literals,  
> and if people wanted to use plain literals they would use private  
> use language sub-tags [BCP47] with skos:prefLabel. If I read [1]  
> that's really the feeling I have. And I worded the SKOS Primer to  
> promote this practice [2].
>
> Second, even though I recognize the interest of having one property  
> for all notations (plain or typed literal) I'm not much in favor of  
> this. For implementors it might make things more difficult, to  
> anticipate both usages.
>
>> The suggestion is that we temper the original wording:
>>
>> [[
>> This property is used to assign a notation to a concept as a typed  
>> literal [RDF-CONCEPTS <http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/#ref- 
>> RDF-CONCEPTS>].
>> ]]
>>
>> which states that typed literals are used for skos:notation (but  
>> note that there are no semantic conditions, so this would just be  
>> convention anyway).
>
> I guess there was a typo in your new wording, which is the same as  
> the old one. Even if I usually trust your arguments I won't buy  
> such one ;-)

Antoine, Norman

Alistair and I have talked briefly about this. As Guus says, the OWL  
spec [1] requires that applications treat unrecognised datatypes the  
same as unsupported datatypes, which essentially means treating  
lexically identical items as equivalent. My guess is that this will  
actually be appropriate behaviour for the majority of notations.

Norman seems happy with the notion of adding the datatype to the  
notation, although with the caveat that he didn't want to make things  
any more complicated that providing a datatype URI. Our proposal is  
now to revert to the original wording (e.g. skos:notation is used  
with typed literals), and possibly include a reference to [1] in the  
text.

Would you be happy with this?

	Sean

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/#DatatypeSupport
--
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, 17 October 2008 08:59:28 UTC