Re: is FRBR relevant?

On Mon, Aug 09, 2010 at 10:19:53PM -0400, Young,Jeff (OR) wrote:
> >      Nomen: any sign or sequence of signs (alphanumeric characters,
> > symbols, sound, etc.) that a thema is known by, referred to, or
> > addressed as.
> 
> "Sound" as a Nomen looks difficult to implement using skosxl:Label but
> it's probably difficult to implement period. I doubt it's worth a whole
> new model.

I do not see anything obvious in the formal semantics of
skosxl:Label [1] to preclude its use with (serializations
of) sound.  It's just that "out of the box", SKOS-XL comes 
equipped with the notion:

    The property chain (skosxl:prefLabel, skosxl:literalForm)
    is a sub-property of skos:prefLabel.

Skos:prefLabel is a sub-property of rdfs:label, and the
rdfs:range of rdfs:label is rdfs:Literal [2] -- but that only
applies to the label properties, not to the skosxl:Label
class itself.  I don't see any obvious arguments against
coining a convention to the effect that the property chain
"ex:soundLabel, ex:soundForm" expresses the "sonic label"
of a SKOS concept, with skosxl:Label as the rdfs:range of
ex:soundLabel. Or something to that effect...

In favor of Antoine's suggestion of coining an ex:Nomen as
a superclass of skosxl:Label, on the other hand, it could be
argued that the convention (section B.2.4):

    each instance of the class skosxl:Label has one and only
    one literal form

imposes the provision of a literal form and thus needlessly
constrains the use of skosxl:Label.

It is true that SKOS processors designed to follow the W3C
Recommendation would not understand any new properties,
classes, property chains, or other conventions, but over time,
it is a good thing if the language evolves.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/#L5981
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/#ch_label

> > I still don't get how skos-xl would "fix" LCSH.
> 
> LCSH doesn't need "fixed" exactly. The only problem is that too many
> people believe the following URI identifies "the name of the thing"
> (i.e. the literal "World War, 1939-1945") rather than "the thing" (i.e.
> the concept of WWII):
> 
> http://id.loc.gov/authorities/sh85148273#concept 
> 
> Switching from skos:prefLabel to skosxl:prefLabel and coining a new URI
> for the skosxl:Label would help clarify the difference (IMO):
> 
> http://id.loc.gov/authorities/sh85148273#heading

Coining URIs for skosxl:Labels meets other requirements.
For example, all of the labels in FAO's AGROVOC Concept
Scheme -- in AGROVOC terminology, its "lexicalizations"
-- are given URIs, which in turn support the declaration
of explicit relations between labels along the lines of
(simplifying from the actual triples for brevity):

    "FAO" isAcronymFor "Food and Agricultural Organization"

Indeed, the requirement for declaring label relations was
the original reason for designing SKOS-XL.

Tom

-- 
Thomas Baker <tbaker@tbaker.de>

Received on Thursday, 12 August 2010 02:44:12 UTC