- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 11:55:29 -0400
- To: Bernard Vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>
- Cc: public-esw-thes@w3.org
* Bernard Vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com> [2004-04-27 17:26+0200] > > Dan > > > http://dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/Bristol/ shows a > > topic from open directory. > > Would you call this resource a "subject indicator", to use topic maps dialect? I don't know enough about the detailed mysteries of topicmaps there, but certainly this seems close. It is, colloqially, a subject or topic, thought of a thing-in-itself, and distinct from both the thing(s) that topic represents, and from documents and data representing either the topic or the, er, subject of the topic. I give up! this terminology is too overloaded to say anything ;) Put another way... the "etc/England/Bristol/" node in the DMoz topic graph (and its equiv in SKOS) are things that represent "the concept/idea of the place Bristol", rather than representing Bristol directly. There is an additional level of indirection compared to 'raw' RDF (and OWL). > > > I can imagine how this works in SKOS. And > > how we might represent Bristol as a place in RDF. For discussion: how to > > represent (to machines) the connection between these two worlds. > > > > We could easily redo the open directory (dmoz, see > > http://dmoz.org/rdf.html) > > in SKOS. > > As an on'n off ODP editor [1] I had proposed internally to have a look at integration of > ODP in the SW framework. > Not with a great feedback, actually. Remember that RDF dump of dmoz uses an old RDF > format. Yep, it is pretty scruffy, was backed by very early RDF code from Guha and friends when at Netscape/Mozilla. There are scripts around to, rather minimally, fix it up (namespace URIs, character encoding, etc). Those scripts could probably be adapted to emit SKOS rather easily. > > And we can doubtless find some RDF representation of Bristol as > > a member of a class "City", with location info, population, etc... > > > > My hypothesis is that a new property in SKOS, skos:conceptualizes, > > could be used to relate bristol-the-skos-concept to > > bristol-the-thing-in-the-world. > > ... looks to me indeed very close to the notion of "subjet indicator". I suspect so too. Topicmap people have often said that RDF confuses things with their representations. I believe RDF allows such modelling errors to be made, but also that it allows perfect clarity. TMs, on my understanding, try to have more built-in facilities for preserving those distinctions. cheers, Dan
Received on Tuesday, 27 April 2004 11:55:30 UTC