Design Issues (1) - Specialised vocab vs. extensible modular voca bs?

I've added this issue to the discussion on the RDF Thesaurus wiki page
<http://esw.w3.org/topic/RdfThesaurus>

Here is a summary:-


Issue 1 - Specialised vocab vs. extensible modular vocabs?


Although most thesauri are pretty similar, there are important variations,
and many thesauri deviate from the standards. Also, thesauri are very
similar to other KOS e.g. classification schemes, taxonomis, topic maps. How
do we cope with this? 

Option 1 - Define a specialised vocabulary that covers only thesauri that
comply with the standards. 

Option 2 - Define a core vocab that captures what is common to all thesauri.
Then define extension modules to cope with different flavours of thesauri. 

Option 3 - Define a core vocab that captures what is common to all KOS
(thesauri, taxonomies, classification schemes, topic maps etc.). Define
first level extension module for thesauri. Define second level extension for
flavours. 

=== Comments on Issue 1 === 

AJM>> 

What we did previously ( [WWW]early draft of 8.1
<http://www.w3c.rl.ac.uk/SWAD/deliv81.htm>) was half way between (1) and
(2). 

I would like to go for (3), but am prepared to backtrack towards (2), which
may happen when we hit interop with this and OWL. (3) Would mean we have a
way of fitting all these KOS together on the semantic web, which would be a
good thing. 

Going for (3) means we have to define a core vocab. I've kind of assumed
this is what we are doing (tell me if you think it's a bad idea), and issues
below relate first to this core vocab. We need a name for this core vocab,
so at least we can refer to it. For now, I'm going to call it the core
vocab. In code, I'm using the prefix soks. Why soks? Short for SuperKOS! Got
any ideas about a better name? 



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Received on Friday, 31 October 2003 11:20:00 UTC