Re: [Proposal][SKOS-Core] New vocab for arrays of concepts

On Sat, 21 Aug 2004 10:56:52 +0100, Stella Dextre Clarke
<sdclarke@lukehouse.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> 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>'.

Thanks, the background is appreciated. This still suggests to me that
perhaps the node label information is too useful to hide in a literal.

I was wondering about the facet angle - when I first read Alistair's
example I thought that was the intention, that the array was more of a
view (of a facet), where the node label was a selector.

> 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.)

What I had in mind was something like the following (where A1, A2 etc
are the aircraft concepts in Alistair's example):

 <skos:Concept rdf:about="Fn">
   <skos:prefLabel>Function</skos:prefLabel>
 </skos:Concept>

  <skos:Collection rdf:about="COL1">
   <rdfs:label>Aircraft by function</rdfs:label>
   <skos:divisionCharacteristic rdf:resource="Fn" />
   <skos:members rdf:parseType="Collection">
     <skos:Concept rdf:about="A1"/>
     <skos:Concept rdf:about="A2"/>
     <skos:Concept rdf:about="A3"/>
   </skos:members>
   <skos:length>3</skos:length>
   <skos:viewUnder rdf:resource="A"/>
   <skos:ordered>false</skos:ordered>
 </skos:Collection>

Where the node label was naming the facet, then I suppose another
property, something like skos:usesFacet might be used in place of
divisionCharacteristic (or another level of term indirection added).

Cheers,
Danny.

Received on Saturday, 21 August 2004 12:03:15 UTC