Re: [SKOS] SKOS ontology sanity-check? - policy for natural language of rdfs:labels

On Mon, Mar 09, 2009 at 10:53:07AM +0100, Antoine Isaac wrote:
> *Labeling:*
> I know that we already discussed that, and we have to live with the legacy 
> URI local names, despite the fact that I personally find them horrible :-)
> But are we forced to use the same (lack of) policy for the natural language 
> rdfs:labels?
> I don't really understand why the rdfs:label of hasTopConcept is "has top 
> concept" while the rdfs:label of inScheme is not "is in scheme"! Or why the 
> natural language rdfs:label of OrderedCollection is "Ordered Collection" 
> with upper case O and C whereas "broadMatch" has a label "broad match" with 
> only lower case.
> These are minor comments, but maybe one days these labels will be used in 
> some application. And as I have not checked this aspect very much in this 
> review, I'd like to draw your attention on this...

Dear all,

The labels the legacy SKOS vocabulary and in the latest schemas
[1] and [2] (see full list below) label classes in uppercase and
properties in lowercase.

RDF and OWL schemas use names for labels (e.g., Nothing,
equivalentClass, disjointWith, ObjectProperty). FOAF uses
uppercase for classes and lowercase for properties unless the
properties contain uppercase acronyms (e.g., Person, geekcode,
based near, ICQ chat ID). DC uses uppercase for everything
(Alternative Title, Is Part Of, Policy).

I'd be interested to hear how important it is (or not) to
promote a particular approach, but since the SKOS schema will
have an impact on consolidating notions of good practice
through emulation and, as Antoine points out, the labels may
find their way into implementations and displays, it is perhaps
worth pausing to reflect.

I can live with the mixed-case, natural-language approach (with
exceptions involving uppercase acronyms), though I wonder if this
could encourage some users to mistakenly infer that the case of
labels is somehow significant in an application context.

As for the labels themselves, they look fine except for "has
broader transitive" (and the other transitives) which should
perhaps read "has broader transitive _concept_".

Tom

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/CR-skos-reference-20090317/skos.rdf
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/CR-skos-reference-20090317/skos-xl.rdf

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Labels in http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/CR-skos-reference-20090317/skos.rdf:
    Collection
    Concept Scheme
    Concept
    Ordered Collection
    alternative label
    change note
    definition
    editorial note
    example
    has broader concept
    has broader match
    has broader transitive
    has close match
    has exact match
    has member list
    has member
    has narrower concept
    has narrower match
    has narrower transitive
    has related concept
    has related match
    has top concept
    hidden label
    history note
    is in mapping relation with
    is in scheme
    is in semantic relation with
    is top concept in scheme
    notation
    note
    preferred label
    scope note

Labels in http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/CR-skos-reference-20090317/skos-xl.rdf:
    Label
    alternative label
    hidden label
    label relation
    literal form
    preferred label

-- 
Tom Baker <tbaker@tbaker.de>

Received on Tuesday, 21 April 2009 14:37:02 UTC