- From: Stella Dextre Clarke <sdclarke@lukehouse.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 09:31:11 +0100
- To: <public-esw-thes@w3.org>
Intriguing to notice (on the same page originally referneced) that the Open Directory has at least 5 subtly different "concept/ideas of the place Bristol" depending on whether the user approaches them via Gloucestershire, South Gloucs, Somerset, etc. You can tell they are different, because they have different numbers of postings. I suppose SKOS copes happily with representing them differently? NB, if you follow the traditional thesaurus model, the preferred term "Bristol" would be allowed to have only one meaning, and multiple access routes would be permitted using a polyhierarchical structure. ***************************************************** 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 ***************************************************** -----Original Message----- From: public-esw-thes-request@w3.org [mailto:public-esw-thes-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Dan Brickley Sent: 27 April 2004 16:55 To: Bernard Vatant Cc: public-esw-thes@w3.org Subject: Re: geo example * 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 Wednesday, 28 April 2004 04:31:22 UTC