NEW issue 6 - defining semantic relationships

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Short summary:

Issue 6 - Defining semantic relationships

Description: A thesaurus consists of concepts, labels for concepts, and
semantic relationships between concepts. A semantic relationship is a
relationship of meaning. Most thesauri use a similar set of semantic
relationships, which they label 'broader' 'narrower' and 'related'. 

Problem 1: 'broader/narrower' means different things in different thesauri.
In some thesauri it means strictly class-subsumption. In other thesauri it
can mean either is-a, instance-of, or part-of. Also 'related' is not
consistently used. For example some thesauri model part-of relations with
'related', others use 'broader/narrower' 

=> We must invent some mechanism for providing clear definitions of semantic
relationships, and for removing any scope for ambiguity. 

Problem 2: some thesauri have semantic relations other than
'broader/narrower' and 'related'. Some overcome the 'broader/narrower'
fuzziness by using 'BTI', 'BTG' and 'BTP', which stand for
'broader-term-instantive' 'broader-term-generic' and
'broader-term-partitive' respectively. In others there are custom
relationships like 'related-broader'. 

=> We must provide some mechanism by which users can extend the given
relationship set and define their own semantic relations. 

.....


Alistair Miles

CCLRC - Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Building R1 Room 1.60
Fermi Avenue
Chilton
Didcot
Oxfordshire OX11 0QX
United Kingdom

Email:        a.j.miles@rl.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)1235 445440

Received on Tuesday, 11 November 2003 10:33:11 UTC