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

> The problem is: how to extract and explicitly state the semantics that are
> implicit within a thesaurus.

Martin Doerr made a study of the AAT which argued that a large proportion of
its characteristics by division belonged to a fairly small set of base
semantic types - form, function, etc.

Making more use of arrays of concepts semantics automatically is an areas
where I see definite possibilities. They could have potential for
personalised or adaptive views of a KOS. At the moment, they can only be
used for displaying hierarchies (unless you have special purpose software
for a particular thesaurus). It's difficult to make use of them
automatically in retrieval while you are dealing with literals. However, I'm
also not sure about the cost/benefits (and range of application) without
experimenting - Stella's point about not over-complicating things so people
are deterred from building or using thesauri is crucial.

Doug


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Miles, AJ (Alistair) " <A.J.Miles@rl.ac.uk>
To: "Danny Ayers" <danny.ayers@gmail.com>; "Stella Dextre Clarke"
<sdclarke@lukehouse.demon.co.uk>
Cc: <public-esw-thes@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 24, 2004 1:48 PM
Subject: RE: [Proposal][SKOS-Core] New vocab for arrays of concepts


>
> Hi all,
>
> There are some very cool ideas floating around about this.  I thought I'd
> try and partition the problem space a bit ...
>
> 1. The immediate requirement for SKOS Core is to be able to support all
the
> features of a thesaurus that can be extracted from a direct, automated
> transformation from its current form.  So when generating a SKOS
description
> of e.g. the AAT or EH Thesaurus of Historic Aircraft, we can write an
> algorithm that detects that a particular term is intended as a 'guide
term'
> or 'node label', but we cannot write an algorithm that extracts more
> information about the characteristic of division (if indeed there is one -
> see Stella's comments).
>
> What I'm saying is, to generate something like what Danny suggested below
> requires human intervention (i.e. manual labour).  Which is not to say
that
> we shouldn't be thinking about it, because that leads onto another topic
...
>
>
> >
> > 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>
> >
>
> ... and the topic is this: thesaurus -> ontology migration (!!)
>
> The problem is: how to extract and explicitly state the semantics that are
> implicit within a thesaurus.
>
> Because this is a manual task, guidelines, frameworks and tool support
that
> make it easier are requisite.
>
> Anyway, this one I'd like to save for later, because it doesn't bear
> directly on the immediate goal to develop and publish SKOS Core.  However,
> it is an important topic, and some clear guidelines about how to perform
> such a migration would get a few people quite excited I suspect.  And it
is
> a very interesting problem - I'm having to restrain myself :)
>
> Al.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > 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 Tuesday, 24 August 2004 13:41:26 UTC