FW: SKOS & SIMILE, concepts, terms, URIs, mappings

Alistair,
Just a word of support for your explanation concerning the treatment of
concepts, preferred terms and non-preferred terms. The concept (rather
than the term) is the key unit that indexing/meta-tagging attempts to
capture. This very much reflects the intention of ISO 2788, even though
the current standard is not as explicit as we might wish. As work
proceeds on revising BS5723=ISO2788, we hope to see this intention
expressed more clearly.

I further agree with your comment, "literature coming from the thesaurus
world can be far from clear on this matter." Not only literature, but
also the thesaurus management software that is currently on the market.
Most of the available packages are term-oriented not concept-oriented,
and so the outputs from them are not entirely straightforward to present
using the SKOS-Core schema. ( There are a few exceptions, but typically
they have other problems...) The difficulties can of course be overcome,
but care is needed to do so.

Please do not interpret that as a criticism of SKOS-Core! It is intended
as a warning that confusion and difficulties are likely to persist until
such time as the thesaurus-using community has moved on to
concept-oriented models. 

Cheers
Stella

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Stella Dextre Clarke
Information Consultant
Luke House, West Hendred, Wantage, Oxon, OX12 8RR, UK
Tel: 01235-833-298
Fax: 01235-863-298
SDClarke@LukeHouse.demon.co.uk
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Received on Wednesday, 21 April 2004 09:20:21 UTC