Design Issue (3) - How to label concepts?

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 3 - How to label concepts?

In a thesaurus, every concept has one preferred term (label) and 0 or more
alternative terms. 

The obvious way to model this in RDF is to have one property for linking a
resource to a preferred label (I'll call this soks:prefLabel for now) and
one property for linking a resource to any alternative labels (I'll call
this soks:altLabel for now). 

This raises two design questions:- 

Question 1: domain restriction? - Do we (a) restrict the domain of these
properties to soks:Concept or do we (b) allow them to be used with any
resource? 

Question 2: resources or literals? - Do we (a) restrict the range of these
properties to rdfs:Literal, or do we (b) restrict the range to some type of
resource? 

We may be able to re-use and/or extend existing properties, e.g. rdfs:label,
but what we choose to re-use depends on the resolution of these questions,
so I'm saving a discussion of that for later. 

The choice of solution to question 2 has important implications for
multilingual data and labelling ...

... more at <http://esw.w3.org/topic/RdfThesaurus>

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Received on Friday, 31 October 2003 12:04:08 UTC