- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2003 09:18:58 -0500
- To: Dave Reynolds <der@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- Cc: "Miles, AJ (Alistair) " <A.J.Miles@rl.ac.uk>, "'public-esw-thes@w3.org'" <public-esw-thes@w3.org>
Yup, I think it is things "like" Thesauri that are in scope. "like" being under-determined somewhat. Here is my take: RDFS/OWL are RDF's own way of doing this stuff. We don't need to reproduce that. SWAD-E's thes vocab is for representing KOS systems that don't (for whatever reason) directly map into RDFS/OWL, but do map into a thesaurus-like network of relationships amongst named concepts. So: (1) out of scope fido --type--> Poodle --subClassOf--> Dog --subClassOf--> Mammal (2) in scope fido --bt--> Poodle --bt--> Dog --bt--> Mammal Obviously you can talk about the same stuff in both traditions. The explicit RDFS/OWL view (ie. 1. above) is clearer and supports more inference, eg. you can deduce that fido is of type Mammal, thanks to RDFS's formal semantics. (2) is more typical of what we see in the library world, where the looser notion of 'bt' conflates a variety of distinctions. So the idea here is to bootstrap the semantic web by allowing an RDF representation of these fuzzier, messier but still useful databases of related named concepts. Remodelling a thesaurus as an RDF vocabulary (RDFS/OWL) is expensive and time consuming. Dumping out from a thesaurus into TIF should be easy and cheap, and allow some benefit from use of generic RDF tools, although of course missing out on other aspects of RDF which focus on the type hierarchies. Does this make sense? Dan
Received on Thursday, 6 November 2003 09:19:19 UTC