SKOS, controlled vocab, and open world assumption

It is an explicit goal of SKOS to help with controlled vocabularies.


These have a strange behavior with respect to open world assumption.

If I define "Jeremy's Ice Cream Vocabulary" and decide that it only has one item "Raspberry" and Amanda  decides to use it in her application and Claudia is an end user of the App.

We may expect that:
- in the short term, Claudia, Amanda and Jeremy all have to put up with a very limited choice of gelato.

When Claudia gets fed up with this, she may make a request to add Chocolate to the list, to Amanda, who may do so, but this doesn't change Jeremy's list; in fact, I may notice that Amanda has done this, and then decide to make the change myself; which in practice can lead to a failure mode in which Claudia is given a choice between Raspberry, Chocolate and Chocolate.

So …. to abstract:
Controlled vocabularies, by definition, have an authority who decide what's in and what's not in
The user (typically the application designer) may well have local modifications, but rather than the open-world 'say anything about anything' they make a rather more restricted statement about their own world (we will use this additional term in this vocabulary)

And vocabularies then have a change control problem ….


Any thoughts? How are we meant to use SKOS to address these sorts of issues? 


Jeremy J Carroll
Principal Architect
Syapse, Inc.

Received on Friday, 5 April 2013 20:19:31 UTC