- From: Stella Dextre Clarke <sdclarke@lukehouse.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 10:56:52 +0100
- To: "'Danny Ayers'" <danny.ayers@gmail.com>, "'Miles, AJ \(Alistair\)'" <a.j.miles@rl.ac.uk>
- Cc: <public-esw-thes@w3.org>
Just a brief note on two points in Danny's message: 1. "The label of the collection in your example: "Aircraft by function" (a node label or guide term, the Wiki tells me)" The thesaurus standards (ANSI/NISO Z39.19; ISO 2788; and the forthcoming BS8723 all favour calling these things 'node labels' and their function (according to ISO 2788 and BS8723) is either to name a facet or to indicate the characteristic of division of an array. They are sometimes called 'facet indicators', but this is an erroneous use of the latter term. The AAT (Art & Architecture Thesaurus) calls them 'guide terms' but only some of the AAT guide terms function as node labels; others are just dummy terms (i.e. deprecated for indexing) creating steps in the hierarchical display. A number of other thesauri in the museums sector have been following AAT practice. Anyway, an important thing to note is that not all node labels indicate a characteristic of division. Some of them just name a facet, e.g. '<entities>' or '<agents>'. 2. "The 'characteristic of division' seems quite important here, maybe 'function', 'form' or whatever could somehow be stated more explicitly, perhaps as a reference to a skos:Concept with the label 'function' or 'form'" Not sure where this is leading. A few characteristics of division are very common, but plenty others are unusual, sometimes unique, as in '<engines by fuel type>' or '<schools by religious denomination>'. The thesaurus editor simply devises a helpful way of dividing up a collection of items according to the nature of those items. So I would not see it as very practical to prepare an exhaustive list of characteristics of division (except for an existing thesaurus, where you could list all those that happened to appear in it, and the list could turn out very long.) Cheers Stella ***************************************************** 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 Danny Ayers Sent: 20 August 2004 18:53 To: Miles, AJ (Alistair) Cc: public-esw-thes@w3.org Subject: Re: [Proposal][SKOS-Core] New vocab for arrays of concepts > This one of the strongest requirements as yet not supported by SKOS > Core, so I thought I'd try to move this along by making a concrete > proposal. This proposal seems very vocab heavy (i.e. lots of new > constructs) so feel free to shoot this down, or come back with some > better names for the suggested constructs. One or two first impressions, please take lightly. The use of a collection rather than a container seems a good idea, if for no better reason than the containers can confuse by sounding like membership entails more than it does. But I think there is a better reason, that it should be straightforward to interface with this kind of construct programmatically for systems without much RDF/OWL support - e.g. mapping to Java Collections - Sets/Lists (clarification over whether duplicate items can appear might be an idea - I presume not, as there is by definition a division between individual items). Most of the constructs aren't really tied to Concepts, it might be worth considering breaking these out into another namespace as a utility vocabulary, perhaps having skos:inCollection and skos:viewUnder as specializations of properties with a more general domain/range. I'm not sure - might the collections be useful elsewhere in SKOS, say for expressing lists of top concepts? Another thing caught my eye, but I don't know if it would be significant to anyone that actually knows something about thesauri ;-) The label of the collection in your example: "Aircraft by function" (a node label or guide term, the Wiki tells me). The 'characteristic of division' seems quite important here, maybe 'function', 'form' or whatever could somehow be stated more explicitly, perhaps as a reference to a skos:Concept with the label 'function' or 'form'. Cheers, Danny.
Received on Saturday, 21 August 2004 09:56:51 UTC