Re: gender: Why does vCard Ontology define class hierarchy instead of skos:Concept resources ?

On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 6:15 PM, Guus Schreiber <guus.schreiber@vu.nl> wrote:

>
> On 04-06-14 22:35, Simon Spero wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 10:25 AM, Andreas Kuckartz <a.kuckartz@ping.de
>> <mailto:a.kuckartz@ping.de>> wrote:
>>
>>     The vCard Ontology uses a class hierarchy to formulate gender
>>     values (vcard:Female, vcard:Male, vcard:None, vcard:Other and
>>     vcard:Unknown as subclasses of vcard:Gender).
>>
>>     That is unusual and not really usable.
>>
>
> Actually, this is not so weird. This approach has the advantage that the
> value space is easily extendible with new "gender values" (gender is such a
> fluent thing in our society; extensibility could be useful in the future).
>
> For a discussion of the pros and cons of this approach see Alan Rector's
> note of this subject, published in as part of the work of the Semantic Web
> Best Practices Working Group:
>

To clarify the quotation levels:  I did not state that gender as classes
was unusual; I stated the opposite (then I rephrased it, as I got head
songed by Tom Jones).  I even used Cis and Trans as an example of how
subclassing could be used to extend.

The issue that I noted with the use of this model is that the hasGender
property expects the class IRIs (not available in OWL 1 DL).   A further
example of the confusion is that the RelationshipType hierarchy is flat,
even though some of the listed relationship types naturally subsuming other
members  of the relationship type...